Christina Lewis is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene—even before Hurricane Milton followed in its wake—nonprofit charitable organizations such as Samaritan’s Purse and Save Our Allies stepped up to help the storm’s victims.
The president of Samaritan’s Purse, Franklin Graham, told The Daily Signal in a telephone interview that one of the positive things he has seen is neighbor helping neighbor.
“If you’re going to sit in your house or your apartment waiting for the government to come—well, good luck. You’re going to be waiting a long time,” said Graham, the son of the legendary late evangelist the Rev. Billy Graham.
Meet Dianne Messer, who, along with Doug Warden, who is 93-year-old, run Big Oak Mobile Park in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
Dianne was kind enough to show me around the property and introduce me to some of the residence, many of whom have been without power for 10 days.… pic.twitter.com/tRZuvYhqi9
Meanwhile, Save Our Allies founder Sarah Verardo said western North Carolina resembles a war zone in the wake of Helene.
“We are seeing incredible hearts of helping and service,” Verardo said. “And our volunteer team of mostly Special Operations veterans is in there, working right alongside our government and private partners to just be the somebody and be in there making a difference.”
The organization has saved lives, including that of an 11-day-old baby born prematurely, she said.
The veterans on Verardo’s team said the destruction they see in North Carolina resembles what they saw in Afghanistan.
Notice the house on the left. A giant oak tree split it in half. The owner was home at the time and survived. pic.twitter.com/RWV2EQwenx
Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization that provides spiritual and material aid to hurting people around the world, has deployed more than 9,000 volunteers to help families affected by the hurricane. The organization sent three water-filtration systems to hard-hit areas in western North Carolina on Oct. 4.
(Samaritan’s Purse photo)
In a statement, Graham said the systems were originally intended to be used overseas, but now they are needed here in America.
“We are airlifting supplies, mudding out homes, removing trees, and doing so much more—all in Jesus’ name—and we’re thankful for everyone who is helping make it possible,” he said. “We want to remind each person that we help that God loves and cares for them and hasn’t forgotten them.”
The organization had delivered emergency relief supplies in more than 150 helicopter operations, Graham told the Daily Signal.
Meanwhile, Sean Lee, ground team commander of Save Our Allies, said people ask him every day where the Federal Emergency Management Agency is.
“It’s the community, the community of North Carolina, the community of helpers who are here on the ground making a difference every day to try to keep these people alive until there is a bigger response,” Lee said. “We hit communities every day that are just devastated. And I keep using that word, because I can’t find another word.”
FEMA allocated $650 million of this year’s budget to the funding of its Shelters and Services Program “to provide humanitarian services to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security.”
As of Monday, FEMA had spent more than $210 million on Hurricane Helene assistance.
Spoke with a Henderson County native, Tristin, in a Waffle House just south of Asheville. He and his wife have been without power for 9 days.
He called Kamala Harris a “phony.”
I asked him what he thought about FEMA spending $1 billion to house illegal aliens:
TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw has partnered with Samaritan’s Purse and Michaels Stores, an arts and crafts retail chain, to provide supplies to hurricane victims. In a video, McGraw said, that unlike FEMA, Samaritan’s Purse puts “verbs in their sentences” and “they’re out doing things” to help the victims of Hurricane Helene.
— Merit Street | Providing Clarity & Solutions (@MeritStreet) October 8, 2024
Graham said it’s a very worrisome thing that hundreds of people in North Carolina remain missing about 10 days after Helene dissipated.
“We can replace stuff and roads and things like that, but we can’t replace people,” Graham told the Daily Signal. “And, so, I’ve just asked people to pray for the families that have lost loved ones and those that are still missing.”
In prior columns, academic articles, and my book, “The Indispensable Right, I discuss the never-ending litigation targeting Jack Phillips, the Christian baker who declined to make cakes that violated his religious beliefs. Phillips continues to be the subject of continuing lawsuits despite the Supreme Court upholding his right to decline to make expressive products for ceremonies or celebrations that he finds immoral. Now the Colorado Supreme Court has dismissed an action brought by a transgender lawyer against the cake shop and its owner.
Phillips has been the target of an unrelenting litigation campaign for over a decade.
In 2012, Charlie Craig and David Mullins asked Phillips to make a cake for their same-sex marriage. As a devout Christian, Phillips declined. He would sell any pre-made cakes to customers, but said that he could not morally make a cake for same-sex marriages.
That refusal turned Phillips’ tiny bakery into ground zero for the long-standing battle between religious rights and anti-discrimination laws. The Colorado Civil Rights Commission found that Phillips must make the cakes under the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA).
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court in what many of us hoped would be a final resolution of this conflict. I had long criticized the framing of the case (and other cases) under the religious clauses as opposed to taking this as a matter of free speech. In the end, the Supreme Court punted in a maddening 2018 decision that technically ruled in favor of Phillips based on a finding that the Commission showed anti-religious bias against Phillips.
As a result, Phillips was thrown back into an endless grind of litigation as activists targeted his bakery for additional challenges by demanding cakes with other messages that Phillips found offensive.
In 2023, the Supreme Court delivered a major victory for free speech in 303 Creative v. Elenis when it ruled that Lorie Smith, a Christian website designer, could refuse service to a same-sex marriage. Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote “the framers designed the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to protect the ‘freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think.’ … They did so because they saw the freedom of speech ‘both as an end and as a means.’”
The decision was not just a vindication for Smith but Phillips. However, Phillips continued to languish in the Colorado system, spending over a decade in non-stop challenges and lawsuits. Because the Supreme Court could not reach a clear resolution, it left Phillips to the continued pursuit of activists targeting his bakery.
The latest dispute began when Autumn Scardina spoke to the wife of Phillips and requested a pink cake with blue frosting to celebrate her gender transition. When the shop declined, Scardina filed an anti-discrimination claim with the Colorado Civil Rights Division (“the Division”) under section 24-34-306, C.R.S. (2024).
In her complaint, Scardina suggested that this was not a targeting of the famous cake shop but merely an effort to get a birthday cake.
In the complaint, Scardina wrote: “Ms. Scardina repeatedly heard Defendants’ advertisements that they were “happy” to sell birthday cakes to LGBT individuals. Hopeful that these claims were true, on June 26, 2017, Ms. Scardina called Masterpiece Cakeshop from Denver to order a birthday cake for her upcoming birthday.”
The shop said that they could make such a cake. However, “Ms. Scardina then informed Masterpiece Cakeshop that the requested design had personal significance for her because it reflects her status as a transgender female.” When the shop noted that it did not make cakes for gender transitions, Scardina insisted that it was for her birthday.
Having established the basis for the lawsuit, she then filed an administrative action. Eventually, however, she jumped from the administrative process into the courts. That would prove the procedural problem for the Colorado Supreme Court.
Scardina prevailed in the lower courts but the case was dismissed by the Colorado Supreme Court on technical grounds.
Justice Melissa Hart wrote in the Colorado Supreme Court’s majority opinion that
“The underlying constitutional question this case raises has become the focus of intense public debate: How should governments balance the rights of transgender individuals to be free from discrimination in places of public accommodation with the rights of religious business owners when they are operating in the public market? We cannot answer that question.”
The most notable aspect of this opinion is that, after a decade, Phillips is still being dragged through the courts despite the fact that the Supreme Court has recognized his free speech right to decline such contracts.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has defended Phillips and Jake Warner, ADF senior counsel, stated “Enough is enough. Jack has been dragged through courts for over a decade. It’s time to leave him alone.”
It is doubtful that activists will heed that request.
Top Stories • Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are the Most Radically Pro-Abortion Presidential Ticket Ever • Kamala Harris Keeps Lying About Abortion • Tim Walz Scrapped Medical Care for Babies Who Survive Abortions • JD Vance Says Trump Will Defund Planned Parenthood Again
More Pro-Life News • Donald Trump Now Given Best Odds to Win Presidential Race • 41 Million Christians Unlikely to Vote Next Month, We Can’t Let That Happen • Christian Voters Need to Make Pro-Life a Voting Priority • Judge Strikes Down Louisville Kentucky Law Banning Prayer Outside Abortion Centers • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Democrats and their media, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, etc., keep trying to frame Trump as antisemitic when he’s been behind Israel and their effort to defend themselves. Most of the hate against Israel and the Jews has been coming from the left and the Democrats.
By Ben Kew – The Gateway Pundit – Sept 27, 2024
Kamala Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff has suggested that Donald Trump is an anti-semite and that is deliberately putting a target on the back of Jewish Americans. In an interview with MSNBC’s Jen Psaki, Emhoff said that although Donald Trump has said he will fight antisemitism if elected in November, he is in fact an antisemite himself and will do the exact opposite. Here is a transcript of the exchange: (READ MORE)
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
As if supporting the chemical and surgical mutilation of children, murder of unborn babies until birth, and censorship of speech he dislikes wasn’t radical enough, Kamala Harris’ running mate Tim Walz is now backing another extreme Democrat policy: abolishing the Electoral College.
Speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Democrat-run California on Tuesday, the Minnesota governor endorsed getting rid of the system used to elect American presidents since the republic was created.
“All of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need, we need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in,” Walz reportedly said before listing competitive areas in toss-up states he clearly would rather not campaign in.
It didn’t take long for the Harris-Walz campaign to tell their buddies at anti-truth CNN that this is just another time the governor “misspoke.” An anonymous campaign staffer claimed, the outlet says, that “Walz’s call for eliminating the Electoral College is not an official campaign position.”
OK, so who is running this campaign? The actual Democrat candidates whose names are on the 2024 ballot, or the unnamed staffers who keep claiming without evidence that neither of their top candidates backs the radical policies both have publicly endorsed.
While Walz is certainly known for lying his way through politics, one thing neither he nor Harris have been shy about is theirsupport for the most extreme positions adopted by today’s Democrat Party. That brings us back to leftists’ war against the Electoral College. Walz is not alone in wishing to eliminate this presidential election system that protects minority rights and prevents the United States from becoming a straight mobocracy. During her 2020 presidential run, Harris also said she was “open to the discussion” about getting rid of the Electoral College. Many Democrat-led states have signed onto the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would “guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”
The purpose of the Electoral College is to stave off what James Madison called the “tyranny of the majority.” The system gives voters in rural, lesser-populated states a voice in presidential elections by limiting higher-populated states’ ability to solely determine their outcomes. That was also the original design of the U.S. Senate, and without such protections for smaller states, the U.S. Constitution would never have been ratified. That means without constitutional protections for lower-population states, there would be no United States at all.
As with many of America’s institutions, Democrats loathe the Electoral College because it deprives them of the unbridled power to silence all opposition. There’s no need to waste time campaigning to the rubes in “flyover country” if they can juice turnout in Democrat-heavy cities and states instead.
Walz’s fundraiser remarks are an outward display of this disdain. Democrats claim they’re fighting for the “forgotten” man and woman, all the while working to deprive millions of Americans of having a say in the policies that control their lives.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Lately, I’ve been learning a new vocabulary: radiation, infusions, chemotherapy, stem cell transplant. Someone I love got a tough cancer diagnosis. There is nothing quite like bad news from a doctor that makes you think about how much time you have, and how you want to spend it. Life is a fleeting gift. We should not waste a moment.
Sadly, in America, in so many ways, life is not valued. I’m not talking about the mindless hours squandered in front of a glowing television, computer, or phone screen. Most of us spend too much time in such useless pursuits. But that is a personal choice.
It is the government-sanctioned disregard for life that harms so many, and should trouble us all. Under President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the U.S. has seen more abortions, political prisoners, and forgotten disaster victims. Biden and Harris don’t value human life.
Babies’ Lives Matter
Abortion is just one example. While campaign commercials for Kamala Harris scream that states are banning abortion and that access to the deadly procedure is at risk without Harris at the helm, the US saw, in 2023, the most abortions in a decade: an estimated 1,037,000 in the formal health care system. It’s an 11 percent increase since 2020, the last year estimates were available, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks abortion data.
That is enough babies to fill the University of Michigan’s “Big House” football stadium 10 times.
Abortion is big business, and politicians who pledge to keep the abortion racket thriving get huge campaign donations. They can afford it. The nonprofit Planned Parenthood Federation of America showed more than a half billion dollars in gross receipts in 2023. President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson earned nearly $584,000 that year, outpacing the $400,000 annual salary of the U.S. president. With so much money on the line, the idea of making abortion safe and rare is not the goal anymore. Killing the unborn is profitable, and it shows in the tone Harris uses when defending the grisly practice.
If Harris valued life, she would work to develop programs that reduce abortions. Instead, under the Biden/Harris administration pregnancy resource centers have come under attack, and abortions have soared to record numbers.
Pro-Life Americans’ Lives Matter
The Biden-Harris Department of Justice (DOJ) sentenced three pro-life activists in late September for praying, singing church hymns, and standing in the hallway of a now-shuttered abortion business in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, back in 2021. They were there to persuade women not to have an abortion and were convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which makes it a federal crime to interfere with someone getting an abortion. The DOJ added a conspiracy charge, making the maximum possible sentence 11 years in prison.
These three had their sentencing delayed because they were charged in other, similar cases. They were part of a larger group that has already been sentenced.
Chester Gallagher of Tennessee was sentenced to 16 months in prison.
Heather Idoni was sentenced to eight months in prison, to be served concurrently with the 24-month sentence she is now serving for similar charges in Washington, D.C., and she will be sentenced for another case in Michigan.
Eva Edl, 89, was given three years of probation. As a child, Edl was taken by train cattle car as a prisoner to the Gakova (also spelled Gakowa) communist-run concentration camp in Yugoslavia, where she faced starvation. Today, she considers sitting in front of the doors of abortion businesses her way of sitting on the train tracks to stop children from dying.
After the Supreme Court’s June 2022 Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe. v. Wade, Biden issued an executive order directing his administration to address security risks at abortion businesses.
In July 2022, the DOJ announced it was forming the Reproductive Rights Task Force, with a goal of enforcement of the FACE Act. Since then, the DOJ has sent the FBI to the homes of pro-lifers, intimidated them, and thrown many in federal prison for years for FACE violations that happened before the crackdown.
These pro-lifers have spent much of their lives rescuing babies. Children are alive today because they convinced mothers to turn away from the abortion mill. They didn’t steal a car or stab someone — both serious crimes that have received less punishment. But their lives have been turned upside down by Biden’s policies.
The business of abortion gets more protection that a typical crime victim because Harris and Biden don’t value the lives of babies, the lives of the pro-lifers, or the lives of violent crime victims.
No matter how you feel about abortion, all Americans should be concerned when politicians use the force of the government to impose harsh prison sentences on gentle people, stealing years of their lives.
Policies Honoring Life Matter
If Harris and Biden valued the lives of the people hurt by Hurricane Helene, they would have swiftly focused on hurricane relief. The administration would have communicated directly with the victims without prompting, they would have set up searches in the hardest hit areas, and they would have quickly moved food, water, shelter, and medical supplies to the affected areas.
They would try to negotiate an end to wars around the globe instead of perpetuating human misery with endless funding.
If they valued human lives, Harris and Biden would admit human trafficking, and all the suffering it causes, is intertwined with our open border, and make it stop. And they would develop dignified solutions to homeless encampments.
But none of this is second nature to leaders who don’t honor life.
Time is not on our side. Life is a fleeting gift.
Let us choose leaders who show up in hard times, seek policies that help people thrive in their lives, and work to bring peace to a groaning world.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
Former President Trump will hold a rally this month at New York City’s Madison Square Garden (MSG), Fox News Digital has confirmed. The rally is set to take place on Oct. 27, multiple sources told Fox News Digital, just nine days before Election Day. The event is expected to be first-come, first-serve, and campaign officials are expecting massive attendance.
“Like Coachella and others to come, MSG is because we are adding some very big venues because we are seeing very high interest in attending events,” a campaign source told Fox News Digital.
Former President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Uniondale, New York on Wednesday, September 18, 2024. (Julia Bonavita/Fox News Digital)
MSG is a 19,500-seat venue.
The former president, speaking at a campaign event in Scranton, Pennsylvania later on Wednesday, highlighted that “we just rented Madison Square Garden. We’re going to make a play. We’re going to make a play for New York. Hasn’t been done in a long time. It hasn’t been done in many decades.”
Then President Ronald Reagan in his 1984 re-election landslide, was the last Republican to carry New York in a White House race.
“We’re making a play for New Jersey. We’re making a play for Virginia,” Trump continued, before adding that he’s also aiming to compete in Minnesota and New Mexico.
The latest Fox News Power Rankings in the 2024 presidential election rank New York and New Jersey as solid Democrat, with Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia as likely Democrat.
Former President Donald Trump will hold a rally this month at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Fox News Digital has confirmed. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
This will be Trump’s second big rally in the state of New York.
Trump held a rally at the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, Long Island, last month. More than 60,000 tickets were requested, but the venue only seats 16,000. Thousands of supporters who were not admitted to the venue watched him speak on large screens outside.
Trump also held a rally in the Bronx over the summer at Crotona Park, which had a permit allowance of 3,500 people. The New York Post reported the Bronx rally drew up to 10,000 supporters.
Former President Donald Trump, center, during a campaign event at Crotona Park in the Bronx borough of New York, on Thursday, May 23, 2024. Photographer: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images (Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, Trump has drawn massive crowds for his latest rallies, with more than 20,000 people attending his second rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, over the weekend.
The campaign also said they saw more than 100,000 people at the former president’s rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, in May.
A billboard at a Trump rally in Wildwood declaring historical blue New Jersey is “Trump Country.” (The Image Direct for Fox News Digital)
The Garden, which is the home of the New York Knicks and New York Rangers, hosted the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the Democratic National Convention in 1924, 1976, 1980 and 1992.
Earlier this year during a campaign stop at an Upper Manhattan bodega, Trump said he would “straighten out New York.”
Madison Square Garden. (Joan Slatkin/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
“We’re going to come in — number one, you have to stop crime, and we’re going to let the police do their job. They have to be given back their authority. They have to be able to do their job,” Trump said. “And we’re going to come into New York. We’re making a big play for New York, other cities, too. But this city, I love this city.” Trump said New York has “gotten so bad in the last three years, four years.”
“And we’re going to straighten New York out. So running for president, we’re putting a big hit in New York — we could win New York,” Trump said.
The New York Post first reported that Trump would rally at MSG.
While it is unlikely deep blue New York flips red in the White House race, another rally in the state may help Republicans down the ballot, as they try to hold on to their House of Representatives majority in November’s elections.
We previously discussed the defamation lawsuit against Deadspin and writer Carron Phillips over an article claiming that nine-year-old Holden Armenta appeared at a Chiefs game in 2023 in black face. I noted in a prior column that I believed that the court would view this as a matter that had to go to a jury. It now has. Superior Court Judge Sean Lugg this week rejected Deadspin’s motion to dismiss.
Phillips posted a side image of Holden at a game of the Kansas City Chiefs against the Las Vegas Raiders, showing his face painted black. The 9-year-old was wearing a headdress while doing the signature “Tomahawk Chop.”
Phillips went into full attack mode.
The senior Deadspin writer had a Pavlovian response in a scathing article on the boy’s “racist” and “disrespectful” appearance.
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate black people and the native Americans at the same time…Despite their age, who taught that person that what they were wearing was appropriate?”
Phillips also denounced the NFL for “relentlessly participating in prejudice.” In a now-deleted tweet, Phillips later called people “idiots” for “treating this as some harmless act.”
Of course, the full picture showed that Armenta had the other half of his face painted in red paint — the Chiefs colors. It also turns out that he is Native American. Indeed, his grandfather is serving on the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians.
Deadspin obviously valued Phillips’ take on race as do other journalists and columnists. Despite his past controversial writings, he was selected as the 2019 & 2020 National Association of Black Journalists Award Winner.
In Armenta v. G/O Media, Inc. Lugg wrote that “[h]aving reviewed the complaint, the court concludes that Deadspin’s statements accusing [Holden] of wearing black face and Native headdress ‘to hate black people and the Native American at the same time,’ and that he was taught this hatred by his parents, are provable false assertions of fact and are therefore actionable.”
The opinion turned on whether this could be treated as opinion as opposed to a statement of fact. California law applied in the case and the court focused on two opinions that held that claims of racism can be statements of fact. Lugg wrote:
Generally, statements labeling a person as racist are not actionable. “A term like racist, while exceptionally negative, insulting, and highly charged—is not actionable under defamation-type claims because it is a word that lacks precise meaning and can imply many different kinds of fact.”…
Deadspin argues that the statements alleging H.A. wore Black face are nonactionable for the same reasons that calling him racist would be non-actionable. {“Blackface is used to mock or ridicule Black people; it is considered deeply offensive.” Deadspin, in recasting Black face as “culturally insensitive face paint” in the December 7 Update, recognizes the negative understanding of the descriptive term.} … But there is a legally significant distinction between a statement calling someone a racist and a statement accusing someone of engaging in racist conduct; expressions of opinion are not protected if they imply an assertion of an objective, defamatory fact. Two recent decisions applying California law, Overhill Farms, Inc. v. Lopez (Cal. Ct. App. 2010) and La Liberte v. Reid (2d Cir. 2020), assist in clarifying this distinction.
The Court in Overhill Farms held that “a claim of racially motivated employment termination is a provably false fact.” In that case, a group of employees accused their employer of engaging in racist firings of Hispanic workers as a pretext to hide racist and discriminatory abuse against Latina women immigrants. After the employer sued for defamation, the employees moved to dismiss, arguing that their statements were non-actionable opinions. The California Court of Appeals denied the employees’ motion, reasoning:
[D]efendants did not merely accuse [their employer] of being “racist” in some abstract sense …. [I]n almost every instance, defendants’ characterization of [their employer] as “racist” is supported by a specific reference to its decision to terminate the employment of a large group of Latino immigrant workers. The assertion of racism, when viewed in that specific factual context, is not merely a hyperbolic characterization of [the employer’s] black corporate heart—it represents an accusation of concrete, wrongful conduct…. [T]he statements reflected in defendants’ written press release, leaflets and flyers accused Overhill of more than harboring racist attitudes; they accused Overhill of engaging in a mass employment termination based upon racist and ageist motivations. Such a contention is clearly a “provable fact;” indeed an employer’s motivation for terminating employment is a fact plaintiffs attempt to prove routinely in wrongful termination cases.
In La Liberte v. Reid, a community activist brought suit after a television host republished two photographs of her at a pro-immigration rally with captions alleging racist conduct. The first caption accused the plaintiff of screaming “You are going to be first deported … dirty Mexican!” at a 14-year-old boy. The second caption compared a photograph of the plaintiff to white Americans yelling at the Little Rock Nine. The television host moved to dismiss the activist’s defamation claims, arguing that her statements were “nonactionable statements of opinion.” The trial court agreed and granted dismissal. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, explaining:
A reader could interpret the juxtaposition of the Photograph with the 1957 Little Rock image to mean that [plaintiff] likewise screamed at a child out of racial animus—particularly in light of [defendant’s] comment that “[h]istory sometimes repeats.” That interpretation is bolstered by [defendant’s] description of the white woman in the Little Rock photograph as a “person screaming at a child, with [her] face twisted in rage” and [her] comment that it was “inevitable” that the photos would be juxtaposed. [Defendant] thus portrayed [plaintiff] as a latter-day counterpart of the white woman in 1957 who verbally assaulted a minority child. Like the defendants in Overhill Farms, [defendant] “did not merely accuse [plaintiff] of being ‘racist’ in some abstract sense.” Rather, her July 1 Post could be understood as an “accusation of concrete, wrongful conduct,” which can be proved to be either true or false. That makes it potentially defamatory.
The Armentas contend that the Original Article and its Updates involve defamatory statements regarding conduct that is provably false and, therefore, this Court should be guided by Overhill Farms and La Liberte. These statements include:
(1) H.A. was wearing “Black face;”
(2) H.A.’s conduct in wearing “Black face” was motivated by his hatred of Black people;
(3) H.A.’s wearing of a Native headdress resulted from his hatred of Native Americans;
(4) H.A. is part of a “future generation[ ]” of racists who had “recreate[d] racism better than before”; and
(5) Raul and Shannon Armenta “taught” their son, H.A., “racism and hate” in their home.
Deadspin’s audience could understand its portrayal of H.A. to mean that his entire face was painted black and, because his entire face was painted black, it was H.A.’s intent to disrespect and hate African Americans. The publication went beyond an expression of opinion and flatly stated H.A.’s motivation for appearing as he did.
Similarly, a reader could be left with the belief that H.A. wore a Native American headdress as a signal of disrespect to that population. Any doubt as to the thrust of these representations is resolved in the opening line of the article, where the author unequivocally asserts, “It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native American at the same time.”
While arguably couched as opinion, the author devotes substantial time to describing H.A. and attributing negative racial motivation to him. Further, the article may be reasonably viewed as derogating those who may have taught him—his parents. A reader might not, as Deadspin contends, interpret this assertion as a reflection of the author’s opinion. To say one is a racist may be considered opinion, but to plainly state that one’s attire, presentation, or upbringing demonstrates their learned hatred for identifiable groups is actionable. A reader may reasonably interpret the Article’s assertion that H.A. was wearing Black face as fact….
The CBS broadcast showed H.A. for approximately three seconds. In those three seconds, viewers could see that H.A.’s face was painted two colors: black and red. Deadspin published an image of H.A. that displayed only the portion of H.A.’s face painted black and presented it as a factual assertion that there was a “Chiefs fan in Black face” at the game. The complaint asserts facts that, reasonably interpreted, establish Deadspin’s Original Article and its Updates as provably false assertions of fact….
Deadspin contends that La Liberte and Overhill Farms stand as outliers from decisions recognizing that accusations of racist behavior are “inherently subjective and therefore non-actionable[.]” Not so. They reflect reasoned assessments of the lines between protected and actionable speech and offer a paradigm for identifying and assessing provably false allegations of racial animus. This Court may grant Deadspin’s motion under Rule 12(b)(6) only if “under no reasonable interpretation of the facts alleged could the complaint state a claim for which relief might be granted.” Applying the analytical framework of La Liberte and Overhill Farms to the facts here, the Armentas maintain a “possibility of recovery.” …
This is a well-constructed and well-supported decision that could have lasting importance. In an age of rage, including race-baiting columns like the one in this case, the opinion is a shot across the bow for publications like Deadspin.
We have seen a series of major rulings allowing public figures to go forward in other defamation lawsuits against media companies. In addition to alienating much of their markets with echo journalism, these outlets are now facing mounting legal costs due to attack pieces like this one. The bill is now coming due.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Biden-Harris administration has billions to help Ukraine, Iran, illegal aliens, Lebanon in the Middle East, student Loan bailouts, etc., but only peanuts for American victims of Hurricane Helene and Milton.
Biden-Kamala Regime Burns $1 BILLION in FEMA Funds to Resettle Illegal Immigrants — FEMA Now Lacks Resources for Disaster Response!
By Jim Hoft – Oct 3, 2024
As Hurricane Helene tears through the eastern seaboard, leaving devastation in its wake, the mismanagement of FEMA under the Biden-Harris regime is hitting home with deadly consequences. The storm’s ferocious winds and torrential rains have claimed at least 190 lives, left millions without power, and trapped countless families in floodwaters across North Carolina and beyond. Entire communities have been cut off from vital resources, with citizens scrambling for help. Yet, in the face of this national disaster, the Biden-Harris administration’s FEMA appears woefully unprepared. READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
South Dakota announced Monday it has removed 273 noncitizens from its voter rolls, dealing a major blow to Democrats’ narrative that foreign nationals aren’t interfering in U.S. elections. The announcement was revealed in a Department of Public Safety (DPS) press release, which noted that the “discovery was part of a review to ensure the integrity of South Dakota’s elections and safeguard against improper voter registration.” The agency said the efforts to remove these noncitizens from the rolls are being handled by the office of Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson.
“Ensuring the integrity of our elections is our highest priority,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are proud of the thorough work done to safeguard South Dakota’s voter rolls. We worked closely with DPS to resolve this issue, and we’re constantly working to make sure that only eligible citizens are participating in our elections.”
While regularly dismissed by Democrats and their media allies as a non-issue, foreign nationals inserting themselves into America’s electoral process is anything but. In recent months, numerous states have collectively removed thousands of noncitizens who were registered to vote in their respective jurisdictions.
On Monday, Oregon announced that state officials identified “an additional 302 people on the state’s voter rolls who didn’t provide proof of citizenship when they were registered to vote,” according to Fox News. That figure brings the total number of suspected noncitizens registering to vote since 2021 up from its previous estimate of 1,259 to 1,561.
In May, the office of Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose discovered 137 voter registrations “assigned to Ohio residents who have twice confirmed their non-citizenship status” to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. State officials revealed in August they subsequently found an additional 499 noncitizens who were registered to vote.
In an August executive order, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disclosed that the commonwealth’s department of elections had removed 6,303 foreign nationals from the state’s voter rolls since he took office in January 2022. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen revealed that same month plans to clear 3,251 potential noncitizens from the Yellowhammer State’s voter registration lists.
Texas has similarly removed 6,500 suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls since 2021, according to an August announcement by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Last month, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird brought charges against Jorge Oscar Sanchez-Vasquez, a noncitizen legally residing in the United States, for allegedly registering to vote and casting a ballot in a 2024 city council race.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
At the Economic Club of Pittsburgh, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris recently said she would “engage in what Franklin Roosevelt called ‘bold, persistent experimentation,’” as he had told the 1932 graduating class at Oglethorpe University. But she did not mention FDR’s vision of “remaking the world,” which included fundamentally changing “our popular economic thought” to see to “a wiser, more equitable distribution of the national income.” Instead, she said she would seek “practical solutions” and even declared, “I am a capitalist.” She said she’s “been working with entrepreneurs and business owners” for her “whole career.” (No one has yet even been able to verify Harris’ job at McDonald’s.)
She also professed her belief in “an active partnership between government and the private sector,” sounding much like FDR at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 1932. There he called for a new “economic constitutional order” built together by an “enlightened administration” and “enlightened businessmen” who together would “[adjust] production to consumption.”
Indeed, the desire to control production and fix prices was the aim of the largest contributor to the Roosevelt campaign, Wall Street speculator Bernard Baruch. He got the wish he paid for, the NRA (National Recovery Administration). Similarly, Harris supporter and billionaire Mark Cuban is vying for the position as head of the Securities and Exchange Commission and calling those who call Harris a Marxist “idiots.”
It was natural that Harris would quote Roosevelt. Biden referenced FDR in his speeches, especially in his last State of the Union address, when he invoked the “Four Freedoms,” which became the basis of his campaign (before it was usurped by Harris). The media hailed Barack Obama as the second coming of FDR, with the Nov. 24, 2008, Time magazine cover showing Obama posed as FDR in a convertible, clenching the characteristic cigarette-holder.
But as Ben Shapiro pointed out, Roosevelt’s “bold, persistent experimentation” actually prolonged the Depression. So also warned James Freeman. Relying on Amity Shlaes, Freeman noted that FDR’s impulsiveness made it impossible for businesses to plan ahead.
FDR’s Ignorance
Indeed, as I point out in my book, FDR was barely capable of keeping a sustained thought, flitting from one subject to another, like Harris does in “word salads.” He would tell two advisors with diametrically opposed solutions to compromise. He would incorporate contradictory statements into the same speech. He was ignorant about economics and made no effort to learn. Prejudices learned in childhood guided his foreign policy. Yet, he felt himself qualified to plan the economy and the lives of all Americans.
FDR experimented, indeed. He followed the economic theories of his Brain Trust (“cornfield philosophers” with Ph.D.s, as John T. Flynn called them). Instead of letting prices bottom out and the economy recover as it had after World War I, the Brain Trust ordered farmers late in the spring of 1933 to plow under crops and then taxed processors. The NRA set prices, driving out small businesses.
The result? Food shortages and increased prices for people already hungry.
Harris’ “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging” by food companies promises the same results.
The Politically Connected
Another experimental idea was to confiscate the gold that American citizens had been “hoarding.” Average Americans who had tried to protect their investments were ordered, by threat of a 10-year prison term and a $10,000 fine, to hand in gold bars and even Christmas gold coins. FDR then determined the price of gold, sometimes by multiples of “lucky numbers.” But Baruch kept his gold. Today, politically connected stock market speculators, e.g., those married to the former Democratic Speaker of the House, use advance knowledge about legislation to sell stocks at a profit.
Similarly, Harris’ economic policies will not provide the “opportunity” she promises to all equally. Just as FDR doled out federal funds to court votes, federal funds will be doled out selectively. She promises to increase the startup deduction from $5,000 to $50,000 and “provide low- and no-interest loans” to small businesses. On what basis? Will the loans be forgiven, just like student loans? As business owner Chad O. Jackson asks, is even a $5,000 loan needed to start a business?
Redistribution of Wealth
On MSNBC, after her speech, Harris said that she would cut the “red tape” involved in housing and low-income housing construction. She explained, “some of the work is going to be through what we do in terms of giving benefits and assistance to state and local governments around transit dollars, and looking holistically at the connection between that and housing, and looking holistically at the incentives we in the federal government can create for local and state governments to actually engage in planning in a holistic manner that includes prioritizing affordable housing for working people.”
Out of this holistic mess we can gather that federal assistance will be contingent on where the housing is built (near public transit). Such stipulations indicate more“red tape” and an exacerbation of a housing crisis largely created by the government.
Her “$25,000 down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers,” she explains, would mean “creating the ability of that working person to build intergenerational wealth.”
Like FDR, she wants a redistribution of wealth. Her ideas about “intergenerational wealth,” referred to twice in her speech and then on MSNBC, echo Nikole Hannah-Jones’ argument for reparationsbecause of advantages in white “generational wealth.” Harris is a big fan of Hannah-Jones. She called Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project a “masterpiece” that told the “truth” of how “the very foundation of our country was built on the backs of enslaved people.” Which first-time homebuyers will get $25,000 from the government? Look at the model Evanston, Illinois, reparations program. Number one priority is “restorative housing.”
Democrats seem to think that quoting FDR will magically reassure voters. Vice presidential candidate Tim Walz tried to salvage a disastrous debate by paraphrasing FDR’s nonsensical statement about having nothing to fear but “fear itself.”
FDR’s Real Legacy
History books, overwhelmingly written by FDR fans, quote his line about fear as if it were a gem of profundity and cast the blame for the extended Depression on other factors, such as obstructionist Republicans and judges. Some argue that FDR did not spend enough money. The fact that he was president during the crisis of depression and war, plus his long-established celebrity status as a Roosevelt, etched him into the national memory as a hero.
Historian David M. Kennedy admits that the Great Depression was “a catastrophic economic crisis that Roosevelt failed to resolve, at least not until World War II came along.” But FDR had “larger purposes.” In 1937, as a second depression hit, FDR worried that economic recovery might be “politically premature.” It might “dismantle the fragile edifice of reforms” he had instituted, and it might weaken the executive branch.
So, Roosevelt’s “reforms” and his power in the executive branch were more important than the well-being of Americans, whose life expectancy was declining. According to Kennedy, the president knew the Depression offered “a rare political opportunity, and Roosevelt made the most of it, to the nation’s lasting benefit.”
What is assumed to be the “lasting benefit” includes such things as unemployment insurance, Social Security, and banking deposit insurance. But these programs’ costs are borne by consumers. Americans’ taxes pay for deposit insurance. While “too big to fail” financial institutions were bailed out during the 2008-2009 recession, average Americans lost their homes. Under Democrat “Green New Deals,” politically connected companies, from Solyndra to Blue Whale Materials, get the loans and contracts. Obama’s make-work plan, with huge signs announcing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 at sidewalks that went nowhere, mimicked the make-work boondoggling of the FDR administration. In both administrations, Washington, D.C., grew and prospered. FDR never really pulled the United States out of the Depression. Obama’s first-term recovery was the slowest one ever.
Like FDR, Kamala Harris is interested in growing the government for political power and transforming the country. If more Americans understood the real FDR, they would be able to see that they do have something to fear: another FDR-like administration.
Fox News’ Bill Melugin on Kamala Harris’ upcoming Arizona border trip as polls show more voters trust Trump on border policy. Former President Donald Trump holds a razor-thin two-point edge over Vice President Kamala Harris in battleground Arizona, according to a new public opinion poll. Fueling the former president’s margin appears to be support from voters age 50 and over.
Trump stands at 49% among likely voters in Arizona, with Harris at 47%, according to an AARP poll conducted Sept. 24-Oct. 1 and released on Tuesday. According to the survey, Green Party candidate Jill Stein grabs 1% support, with 3% undecided.
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign event at the Linda Ronstadt Music Hall on Thursday in Tucson, Arizona. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)
“Among voters 50+, Trump is ahead by 7 points, driven by a 14-point lead among voters 50-64,” the poll’s release highlights.
Harris holds a 4-point advantage among voters under 50, according to the survey, “while the race is a tossup with seniors.”
The poll also points to a gender gap in Arizona which favors Trump. The former president and Republican nominee is up 11-points over the vice president and Democratic nominee among men, but down only 6 points among female voters, the survey indicates.
While on the presidential campaign trail stopping in battleground states, Vice President Kamala Harris walks out into a packed rally in Glendale, Arizona, on Friday, Aug. 9, 2024. (Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
The survey is the latest to indicate a margin of error race between Harris and Trump in Arizona, a state President Biden narrowly carried over Trump in the 2020 election.
Arizona’s one of seven crucial battlegrounds whose razor-thin margins decided Biden’s White House victory four years ago and are likely to determine if Harris or Trump win the 2024 election.
The survey was released on the eve of the kick-off of early in-person voting in Arizona.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump during their first and likely only presidential debate in Philadelphia on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The major party vice presidential nominees – Sen. JD Vance of Ohio and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota – each hold campaign events in Arizona on Wednesday. Harris returns to the state on Friday.
Besides being a crucial presidential swing state, Arizona is also holding one of a handful of competitive Senate elections that will decide if the GOP wins back the chamber’s majority. The AARP poll indicates Democratic Senate nominee Rep. Rueben Gallego holding a 51%-44% lead over Republican nominee Kari Lake, a former news anchor who narrowly lost the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election.
The AARP poll was conducted by the bipartisan polling team of Fabrizio Ward (Republican) & Impact Research (Democrat). The firms interviewed 1,358 likely voters in Arizona. The survey’s overall sampling error is plus or minus four percentage points.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., is calling on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to ensure funds are used solely for disaster recovery and not for illegal immigrants, the Daily Caller reported Tuesday. Luna’s district on Florida’s Gulf Coast was impacted by Hurricane Helene and is now preparing to get hit hard by Hurricane Milton sometime this week. In a letter to FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, obtained by the Daily Caller, Luna raised concerns about the agency’s use of taxpayer money.
“The recent reporting on the Federal Emergency Management Administration’s allocation of congressionally appropriated funds to illegal immigrants, leaving it without the necessary resources to respond to the recent hurricanes, is a matter of urgent concern,” she wrote.
“[Homeland Security] Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas’ statement at a recent press conference, ‘FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season,’ underscores the gravity of the situation. This mismanagement of taxpayer funds is unacceptable and requires immediate remedial action from FEMA.”
Mayorkas said earlier this month that FEMA didn’t have enough money to cover the rest of the hurricane season.
In the letter, Luna asked how much FEMA has spent since January 2021 to cover expenses related to the migrant crisis, including funds sent to cities, nonprofits, and other organizations. She also inquired about the steps being taken to recover those funds. Luna also is seeking assurance that no future FEMA taxpayer funds will be diverted to cover “costs imposed by the illegal migrant crisis.”
Newsmax reached out to FEMA for comment.
Hurricane Helene hit Florida on Sept. 26 as a Category 4 storm, causing widespread damage in six states. FEMA has been under fire for how it responded to that storm. Meanwhile, Florida is bracing for Hurricane Milton, which is expected to make landfall in the Tampa area, likely as a Category 3 storm.
Peter St. Onge is a visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge.
It’s America last as the nation’s disaster relief agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, reports it is broke because it wasted billions on illegals, Ukraine, and other foreign aid instead of, say, the American people.
So says the Department of Homeland Security, with Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas confessing, “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”
The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now
Note this is after Dems strong-armed $12 billion last year by holding it hostage to Ukraine aid, then House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Ky., poured in another $20 billion just weeks ago.
FEMA’s foreigner-depleted cupboards could be part of why the White House dragged its feet declaring Title 10—which sends military resources into disaster zones to help rescue operations.
That largely left rescue to private volunteers—truck drivers, helicopter pilots, and people who have boats, dubbed the Cajun Navy. Some of whom, incidentally, have been threatened with arrest.
Of course, even if you don’t arrest them, there’s only so many private volunteers with helicopters, and they don’t have billions of dollars hijacked from taxpayers then given away to import new voters or pay military contractors.
For example, considering the 82nd Airborne is literally based in North Carolina and in hours deploys halfway around the world, it might be nice to get some help.
Ironically enough, just last week, President Joe Biden announced another $2.4 billion to Ukraine, aid that has historically included generators and transformers bought by USAID that are now desperately needed in North Carolina.
Of course, it wasn’t just Ukraine; everybody from Taiwan to Djibouti apparently has been feasting while our own people go without.
That apparently includes the millions of illegal aliens who showed up uninvited.
Thanks to X, we have the receipts for program after program shipping out FEMA money for illegals a hundred million at a time. The New York Post tallies these for a total of at least $1.4 billion in disaster relief repurposed to bribe sanctuary cities to import replacement voters—especially in swing states.
As America First Legal put it: “Over the last 4 years the Biden-Harris admin has steadily transformed FEMA into an illegal alien resettlement agency.”
So, it’s red carpets for illegals, $200 billion for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and boiling swamp water for North Carolina.
So, what’s next?
For literally millennia, disaster relief has been the touchstone of a functioning government. In China, for example, a poor response to a natural disaster was taken as a revocation of the “Mandate of Heaven”—a sovereign’s right to rule.
This is part of the reason that, even today, countries like Japan, where I am now, take natural disasters very seriously. Because the people are watching. And remembering.
In America, our federal government has long since lost that mandate.
FEMA was a disaster in Hurricane Katrina. In COVID-19. In East Palestine, Ohio. And now in North Carolina.
How did it get this bad? Easy: Because the bureaucracy took over, replacing the people via something called the Pendleton Act, which I’ll cover in an upcoming video.
This means the government’s goal is not serving the people but feathering its own nest—expanding its power and rewarding the donors and lobbyists who pay the politicians to expand that power.
One video out of North Carolina captures the shift perfectly: A police officer threatens to arrest a local couple trying to salvage their flooded store before looters get to it.
There was a time when that officer would have rolled up his sleeves and pitched in. Because his job was to protect and serve. But those days are gone: Protect and serve is now neglect and harass.
The reinvention of Vice President Kamala Harris in this election has been a thing to behold. In politics, candidates often reconstruct their records to secure votes, but Harris appears to have constructed an entirely mythical being. Once ranked to the left of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders and viewed as among the most liberal members of the Senate, Harris has sought to convince the public that she is actually a frack-loving, gun-toting, border-defending moderate. This last week, Harris sounded like she has hired Neo as her new campaign manager from the Matrix. When asked “what do you need, besides a miracle?” Neo replied “Guns. Lots of Guns.”
When CBS’s Bill Whitaker expressed shock at her gun-toting persona on the campaign trail, he asked if she actually fired it. Harris then did her best Rooster Cogburn, who noted “Well a gun that ain’t loaded, ain’t much good for nuthin.” Harris said that she has of course fired the gun in her trips to the firing range.
While she was referring to defending her home, Harris’s pledge to gun down intruders stands in stark contrast to her opposition to stand your ground laws. When she was the San Fransisco District Attorney, Kamala Harris was one of the signatories on the District Attorneys’ amicus brief in District of Columbia v. Heller — in support the handgun ban. The Court rejected the position of Harris and her fellow Democratic DAs and held that there is an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment.
Harris’ true grit has delighted activists who are trying to lure male voters back to the Democratic Party. It may not be as thrilling to some in the Biden-Harris Administration including President Joe Biden.
As we have previously discussed, Biden and other Democrats have repeatedly denounced semiautomatics and some have suggested that, with a change in the Supreme Court, they might be banned. While the Administration has repeatedly called for a ban on AR-15s, the most popular weapon in America, President Biden has suggested in the past that he might seek to ban 9mm weapons.
In reference to guns that use 9mm ammunition, Biden declared “there’s simply no rational basis for it in terms of thinking about self-protection.”
It is a call that has been echoed in Canada where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government is introducing legislation to “implement a national freeze on handgun ownership.” He said Canadians would no longer be able “to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada,” adding that “there is no reason anyone in Canada should need guns in their everyday lives.”
While the White House subsequently tried to walk back his comments, Biden saying there’s “no rational basis” to own 9mms makes the new Harris look . . . well . . . irrational. Both Biden and Harris have made sweeping, unsupportable statements about guns and constitutional protections. For example, despite being repeatedly corrected, President Biden continues to repeat the same false statements about bans on weapons when the Second Amendment was ratified.
Likewise, in support of the ban on AR-15s, Harris declared: “Do you know what an assault weapon is? It was designed for a specific purpose, to kill a lot of human beings quickly. An assault weapon is a weapon of war, with no place, no place in a civil society.”
Yet, courts likely would press a Harris administration on why it is seeking to ban this model when other higher-caliber weapons are sold. AR-15s can handle a variety of calibers. However, they are no more powerful than other semi-automatic rifles of the same caliber and actually have a lower caliber than some commonly sold weapons which use .30-06, .308 and .300 ammunition; many of these guns fire at the same — or near the same rate — as the AR-15. None of these weapons are classified as actual military “assault weapons,” and most civilians cannot own an automatic weapon.
As discussed earlier, President Biden showed the same disconnect as Harris between the factual and the rhetorical basis for some gun-control measures. He condemned “high-caliber weapons” like 9mm handguns and said “a .22-caliber bullet will lodge in the lung, and we can probably get it out — may be able to get it and save the life. A 9mm bullet blows the lung out of the body.”
Biden has not made any comment on Harris promising to blow away anyone coming into her house with her own Glock.
Yet, before condemning Harris for her implied threat to “blow lungs out of bodies,” Biden should again check both the constitutional and practical statements about handguns.
Gun experts mocked the notion that 9mm rounds blow organs out of bodies, but 9mm ammunition is the most popular handgun caliber in the U.S., with more than half of all handguns produced in 2019 using that round, according to Shooting Industry magazine. If Biden pushed a ban, he would target more than 40 percent of all pistols produced in the U.S., including many Glocks.
Again, in fairness to Harris, she is not the first politician to reinvent herself on the campaign trail. For now, Harris wants to be clear that “I have a Glock, and I’ve had it for quite some time.” For critics, the reload is a bit much given her record. Yet, in a close election, many activists want voters in states like Pennsylvania to know that Harris is the virtual Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hills set. Indeed, you get the impression that she would use her Glock to frack, if only she could.
While 9mm’s have been vilified by the Biden-Harris Administration, it just happens to be one of the most popular guns in the United States . . . and Harris wants people to know that she has one and knows how to use it.
As a politician reinventing herself in a higher-caliber image, she chose wisely. Indeed, other politicians may want to take heed and listen to Deputy Marshall Sam Gerard in U.S. Marshalls: “Get yourself a Glock and get rid of the nickel-plated sissy-pistol.”
The Largest-Ever Survey of American Gun Owners Finds That Defensive Use of Firearms Is Common
The results also confirm that “assault weapons” and “large capacity” magazines are widely used for lawful purposes.
The largest and most comprehensive survey of American gun owners ever conducted suggests that they use firearms in self-defense about 1.7 million times a year. It also confirms that AR-15-style rifles and magazines that hold more than 10 rounds, frequent targets of gun control legislation, are in common use for lawful purposes, which the Supreme Court has said is the test for arms covered by the Second Amendment.
The online survey, which was conducted by Centiment in February and March of 2021, was based on a representative sample of about 54,000 adults, 16,708 of whom were gun owners. Georgetown University political economist William English, who commissioned the survey as part of a book project, presents its major findings in a recent paper available on the Social Science Research Network.
The overall adult gun ownership rate estimated by the survey, 32 percent, is consistent with recent research by Gallup and the Pew Research Center. So is the finding that the rate varies across racial and ethnic groups: It was about 25 percent among African Americans, 28 percent among Hispanics, 19 percent among Asians, and 34 percent among whites. Men accounted for about 58 percent of gun owners.
Because of the unusually large sample, the survey was able to produce state-specific estimates that are apt to be more reliable than previous estimates. Gun ownership rates ranged from about 16 percent in Massachusetts and Hawaii to more than 50 percent in Idaho and West Virginia.
The survey results indicate that Americans own some 415 million firearms, including 171 million handguns, 146 million rifles, and 98 million shotguns. About 30 percent of respondents reported that they had ever owned AR-15s or similar rifles, which are classified as “assault weapons” under several state laws and a proposed federal ban. Such legislation also commonly imposes a limit on magazine capacity, typically 10 rounds. Nearly half of the respondents (48 percent) said they had ever owned magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds.
Those results underline the practical challenges that legislators face when they try to eliminate “assault weapons” or “large capacity” magazines. The survey suggests that up to 44 million AR-15-style rifles and up to 542 million magazines with capacities exceeding 10 rounds are already in circulation.
Those are upper-bound estimates, since people who reported that they ever owned such rifles or magazines may have subsequently sold them. But even allowing for some double counting, these numbers suggest how unrealistic it is to suppose that bans will have a significant impact on criminal use of the targeted products. At the same time, widespread ownership of those products by law-abiding Americans makes the bans vulnerable to constitutional challenges.
Two-thirds of the respondents who reported owning AR-15-style rifles said they used them for recreational target shooting, while half mentioned hunting and a third mentioned competitive shooting. Sixty-two percent said they used such rifles for home defense, and 35 percent cited defense outside the home. Yet politicians who want to ban these rifles insist they are good for nothing but mass murder.
Owners of “large capacity” magazines likewise cited a variety of lawful uses. Recreational target shooting (64 percent) was the most common, followed by home defense (62 percent), hunting (47 percent), defense outside the home (42 percent), and competitive shooting (27 percent).
Politicians who favor a 10-round limit argue that no one except for criminals and police officers really needs a larger magazine. Yet respondents described various situations, based on their personal experiences, where “it would have been useful for defensive purposes to have a firearm with a magazine capacity in excess of 10 rounds.” These ranged from muggings and home invasions by multiple attackers to encounters with wild animals.
Maybe these gun owners were wrong to think the ability to fire more than 10 rounds without reloading was important in those situations. But judging from the responses that English quotes, they had cogent reasons for believing that. Bans on “large capacity” magazines routinely exempt current and retired police officers, on the theory that they are especially likely to face threats (such as multiple assailants) that may require more than 10 rounds. It strains credulity to suggest that ordinary citizens never face such threats, and this survey provides further reason to doubt that assumption.
Thirty-one percent of the gun owners said they had used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on multiple occasions. As in previous research, the vast majority of such incidents (82 percent) did not involve firing a gun, let alone injuring or killing an attacker. In more than four-fifths of the cases, respondents reported that brandishing or mentioning a firearm was enough to eliminate the threat.
That reality helps explain the wide divergence in estimates of defensive gun uses. The self-reports of gun owners may not be entirely reliable, since they could be exaggerated, mistaken, or dishonest. But limiting the analysis to cases in which an attacker was wounded or killed, or to incidents that were covered by newspapers or reported to the police, is bound to overlook much more common encounters with less dramatic outcomes.
About half of the defensive gun uses identified by the survey involved more than one assailant. Four-fifths occurred inside the gun owner’s home or on his property, while 9 percent happened in a public place and 3 percent happened at work. The most commonly used firearms were handguns (66 percent), followed by shotguns (21 percent) and rifles (13 percent).
Based on the number of incidents that gun owners reported, English estimates that “guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year.” That number does not include cases where people defended themselves with guns owned by others, which could help explain why English’s figure is lower than a previous estimate by Florida State University criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz. Based on a 1993 telephone survey with a substantially smaller sample, Kleck and Gertz put the annual number at more than 2 million.
Although less than one in 10 of the defensive gun uses identified by English’s survey happened in public places, most of the respondents (56 percent) said they had carried handguns for self-defense. More than a third (35 percent) said they did so “sometimes,” “often,” or “always or almost always.” About the same percentage reported that they had wanted to carry handguns in circumstances where local rules prohibited it.
At the time of the survey, the ability to legally carry handguns in public varied widely across jurisdictions. Some states had highly restrictive laws that gave local officials wide discretion to reject carry permit applications, a policy that the Supreme Court recently deemed unconstitutional. Even after that ruling, some states plan to enforce licensing requirements and/or location restrictions that make it difficult for residents to carry handguns for self-defense. Depending on your perspective, the results of this survey demonstrate either the wisdom or the injustice of that strategy.
English’s survey also asked about incidents in which respondents believed that the visible presence of a gun had neutralized a potentially violent threat. He says that category would include, for example, “a situation in which a combative customer calmed down after noticing that shop owner had a handgun on his or her hip, or a situation in which a trespasser cooperatively left a property when questioned by a landowner who had a rifle slung over his or her shoulder, or a situation in which a friend showed up with a firearm to help [defuse] a dangerous situation.”
Nearly a third of gun owners reported such incidents, and some said they had witnessed them more than once. English says the results imply “approximately 1.5 million incidents per year [in] which the presence of a firearm deterred crime.” That estimate, of course, depends on the respondents’ subjective impressions, so it is probably less reliable than the estimate of explicit defensive uses, which itself is open to the usual questions about the accuracy of respondents’ interpretations and recollections. But even taken with the appropriate measure of salt, the results suggest that competing studies may grossly underestimate the defensive value of guns.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Mayorkas reports FEMA is out of money for victims of Helene after spending it on illegal immigrants. Kamala is offering $750.00 per victim, while individual illegals are getting over 3000 a month and being housed in 5-star hotels.
FEMA, Whose Mission is to Support Citizens, Caught in a Lie: Claims ‘No Money is Being Diverted from Disaster Response’ While Funding Illegal Immigrant Resettlement
By Jim Hoft – Oct. 4, 2024 – The Gateway Pundit
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been caught in a web of deception regarding its spending priorities. As Americans grapple with the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Helene, FEMA insists that no funds are being diverted from disaster relief to support illegal immigrant resettlement. Yet, evidence suggests otherwise. According to the Department of Energy and Environment’s website, FEMA’s “mission is to support the citizens and first responders to promote that as a nation we work together to build, sustain, and improve our capability to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards.”… (READ MORE)
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • Supreme Court Allows Texas Abortion Ban to Stay in Place Protecting Babies • Georgia Supreme Court Issues Order Reinstating Heartbeat Law Saving Babies From Abortions • Kamala Harris Voted Against Giving Medical Care to a Newborn Baby Who Survived Abortion • Fact Check Shows Tim Walz Lied to Hide His Record Promoting Abortion and Infanticide
More Pro-Life News • Supreme Court Stops Biden and Harris From Forcing Texas to Allow Abortions • Josh Hawley: Republicans Must Keep Fighting Abortion “Boldly and Unashamedly” • Tim Walz Exposed for Signing Law for Abortions Up to Birth • Congressman Wants to Repeal Law Kamala Harris is Exploiting to Put Pro-Life Americans in Prison • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz did the interview with Fox News his running mate never will, but instead of moving on from his record of dishonesty, he had another brutal run-in with the truth. On Sunday, Walz joined Shannon Bream for the network’s flagship Sunday political program, where Bream grilled the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee on a range of issues from the serial falsehoods about his personal life to Iran. ABC News characterized the interview as a “cleanup” operation. It came days after the debate with Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, when Walz celebrated friendships with school shooters and struggled to explain his lie about where he was during the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square. Walz has also previously exaggerated his military service and wrongly claimed his own children were conceived through in vitro fertilization (IVF).
“What do you say to the American people who think, ‘I don’t know that I can trust this guy with all those modifications to be the potential commander-in-chief of this country?’” asked Bream.
“I think they heard me,” Walz said, “… and I got to be honest with you, Shannon. I don’t think people care whether I used IUI or IVF when we talk about this. What they understand is Donald Trump would resist those things.”
Bream, however, corrected Walz on former President Donald Trump’s platform, which explicitly endorses IVF. “If we’re going to deal in truth,” Bream said, “both the president, the former president and his nominee have said they are very supportive of IVF.”
Earlier in the interview, Bream pressed Walz about the incumbent immigration crisis that is unfolding under Vice President Harris, the administration’s “border czar.”
“She has policies that make a difference,” Walz said. “Her border policies are the most strongest, the fairest we’ve seen.”
“Governor, you know a lot of people, including your own party, would not join that statement,” Bream said, in light of the fact that more than 10 million illegals having entered the United States under President Joe Biden.
Walz pivoted to complain about Republicans in Congress rejecting a bill, negotiated by Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., that would have codified an open border. “This is a real bill that has bipartisan support. It has the experts on board, and it starts to tackle these issues,” Walz said. The bill, however, also grants asylum for all, with 5,000 crossings permitted on a daily basis.
“That piece of legislation,” Bream said, “does … include the wall. … You’ve disparaged that. I mean, the vice president has as well. So, I don’t know if she really intends to move forward with that.”
In fact, here’s what Harris wrote about the border wall in her 2019 book, The Truths We Hold, when recounting the 2018 budget debate over the barrier:
A useless wall on the southern border would be nothing more than a symbol, a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value, but to the fundamental values upon which this country was built. … How could I vote to build what would be little more than a monument, designed to send the cold, hard message “KEEP OUT”?
Walz ran into another fact-check when he blamed the death of a Georgia woman on Republican abortion laws. “States like Georgia force women to cross the border and then we have a death of Amber Thurman,” Walz said. “Trying to cut hairs on an issue on this is not where the American public is at. They want the restoration of Roe versus Wade. Vice President Harris said she would sign it.”
Bream clarified the Democrats’ support for on-demand abortion goes well beyond the precedent previously established in Roe v. Wade, and then corrected the record on Thurman’s death.
“What her family has said is it was a complication from an abortion pill that she received, and she didn’t get proper care when she went to a Georgia hospital, which had multiple opportunities to intervene there,” Bream said. “Her own attorney, the family’s attorney, says it wasn’t the Georgia law, it was the hospital.”
“I’m a knucklehead at times,” Walz said in last week’s CBS debate with a performance so disastrous, the writers of Saturday Night Live (SNL) mocked him this weekend.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre got into a heated exchange with Fox News Channel’s Peter Doocy over the White House sending aid to Lebanon during the hurricane season, which has had devastating effects on North Carolina.
Harris pledged Saturday to send $157 million of “additional assistance”to Lebanon while Israel attacks Hezbollah infrastructure and targets in the country. Harris argued the country was “facing an increasingly dire humanitarian situation.” Doocy asked Jean-Pierre why the Biden administration was soliciting congressional input before sending disaster loan funds to North Carolina, but not to send the slush funds to a foreign country.
“On this issue of funding, the administration has money to send to Lebanon without Congress coming back. But Congress does have to come back to approve money to send to people in North Carolina. Do I have that right?” Doocy said.
“The president and the vice president has had a robust whole-of-government response to this… More than $200 million, …for the disaster help,” Jean-Pierre responded, adding that “people want to do disinformation, misinformation, which is dangerous.”
Karine Jean-Pierre gets into heated exchange with Fox News Peter Doocy Monday. (Fox News Digital)
Doocy asked whether the president’s letter to Congress soliciting their help was misinformation.
“No. The way you’re asking me the question is misinformation. There is money that we are allocating to the impacted areas, and there’s money there to help people who truly need it. There are survivors who need the funding, who need the funding. And it’s there,” she said.
“You can’t call a question you don’t like misinformation,” Doocy said.
“No, what you’re asking me is why Congress needs to come back and do their job. That’s what you’re asking me. Congress needs to come back and do their job and provide extra assistance, extra funding for the disaster relief fund. That’s what Congress needs to do,” she responded. “You may not want that, but that’s okay. That’s what this president wants, and that’s what the vice president wants.”
Jean-Pierre then stormed out of the briefing room.
The administration has been accused of mismanaging funds after Homeland Security’s Alejandro Mayorkas said Wednesday “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”
Workers, community members, and business owners clean up debris in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in Marshall, North Carolina on Monday, Sept. 30, 2024. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
“Kamala is touting giving money to the people of Lebanon-while stiff-arming the humanitarian crisis in North Carolina,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said on X. “This is Kamala’s Katrina.”
“Could this be any more tone deaf? We have Americans suffering and in danger right now after the hurricane and this is what Kamala has to announce. America First!” Rep. Nick Langworthy, R-N.Y., said on X.
The controversial tweet comes as the Biden administration has continued to face backlash for its handling of Helene, with former President Trump calling the federal response to the disaster the “most incompetently managed ‘storm,’ at the federal level, ever seen before.”
Fox News’ Michael Lee contributed to this report.
Hannah Grossman is a Reporter at Fox News Digital.
Students participate in a pro-Palestine protest at Columbia University in New York City, Nov. 15, 2023. (Spencer Platt via Getty Images)
One year after the deadliest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, 3.5 million American Jews say they have experienced antisemitism, according to a recent study.
“One out of every five American Jewish children have experienced antisemitism since Oct. 7,” EJ Kimball, director of Christian engagement at Combat Antisemitism Movement, said during an event at The Heritage Foundation on Monday to mark the anniversary of Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel.
Kimball, a father of two, said both his children have experienced antisemitism at school in the past year. According to the survey, which was conducted by Dr. Ira Sheskin of the University of Miami and commissioned by Combat Antisemitism Movement, 61% of American Jews report feeling less safe since the terrorist attack a year ago.
Hamas terrorists killed about 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, on Oct. 7, and another 250 were taken hostage. Today, 93 Israelis are still being held hostage in Gaza, including four Americans with dual citizenship.
Kimball and several other experts in the field of combating antisemitism addressed the circumstances that led to Oct. 7 and the swift rise in anti-Jewish sentiment on college campuses during Monday’s event.
How Hamas Was Able to Carry Out Oct. 7
While Hamas carried out the deadly terrorist attack, Iran sponsored it, according to Fred Fleitz, vice chair of Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute.
“Iran is the head of the snake,” Fleitz said during a panel discussion. “Iran is funding Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthi rebels and Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq.”
Iran had the money to fund the attack at least in part because the U.S. government gave Iran access to billions of dollars as part of a prisoner exchange and the Biden administration “ignored all the sanctions that were introduced in the previous administration, allowing [Iran to sell] oil in the market and other business activities, allowing Iran to earn another $50 to $100 billion,” according to Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America.
“The reserves went from $4 billion to $100 billion, enabling them to fund and arm Hamas and Hezbollah,” added Klein.
But Iran’s financial favor was not the only circumstance that led to Oct. 7. In 2005, all Israeli settlements in the Gaza strip were dismantled and “that was a terrible mistake,” according to Klein. In 2007, Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip. Hamas was also able to carry out the attack a year ago because of “Biden pressuring Israel to give work permits to Gaza civilians,” Klein said.
“These innocent Gaza civilians gave Hamas the routes, maps where the kindergartens were, where the schools are, the residents in each home, so they knew exactly what they were doing,” he said.
Israel should have also created a “buffer zone” between Israel and Gaza, Klein argued, adding that Israel may have missed an opportunity to destroy Hamas in 2021 after Hamas fired missiles at Israel. The Jewish state did respond, but the U.S. encouraged Israel to limit its response, which it did.
America has also given funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which, according to Klein, “teaches hate and violence to Arabs.”
The United States is “in part responsible for Hamas remaining strong and remaining really in existence,” Klein said.
Why Did Pro-Palestine Protests Break Out So Quickly After Oct. 7?
The bodies of dead Israelis were hardly cold following the Oct. 7 attack when pro-Palestine protests broke out on college campuses in the U.S.
“One day after that attack, these individuals started coming out and protesting Israel’s right to defend itself right here in the heart of America,” Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said during Monday’s event.
The individuals Schanzer is referring to are not so much the students protesting at Columbia University and other schools, but a group known as American Muslims for Palestine.
American Muslims for Palestine is “the group that incubated, funded, and directed Students for Justice in Palestine,” Schanzer said. Students for Justice in Palestine has organized many of the pro-Palestine campus protests over the past year.
“And, of course, we see people showing up at each one of these things—adults that have no business being on campus—and you’ve got to start to ask yourself, why?” Schanzer said.
Kimball says there has been a “colossal failure from leadership” on college campuses to call out antisemitism. The Combat Antisemitism Movement director contends that there should be consequences for students who participate in these “pro-genocidal protests” because “most of them have no idea what they’re even doing. They’re being used [and] manipulated.”
Below is my column in The Hill on the release of the filing by Special Counsel Jack Smith just weeks before the election. Even Judge Tanya Chutkan described the move as “irregular,” but still ordered the release. While the usual voices heralded the move, others, including the CNN senior legal analyst, denounced the release as a raw political act by the court and the Special Counsel. The problem is that it was not in the least bit surprising.
Here is the column:
“The most stupendous and atrocious fraud.” Those words from federal prosecutors could have been ripped from the filing this week of Special Counsel Jack Smith defending his prosecution of former President Donald Trump.
Yet they were actually from a Justice Department filing 184 years ago, just days from the 1840 presidential election. Democratic President Martin Van Buren was struggling for reelection against Whig William Henry Harrison, and his Justice Department waited until just before voters went to the polls to allege that Whig Party officials had paid Pennsylvanians to travel to New York to vote for Whig candidates two years earlier. It was considered by many to be the first “October Surprise,” the last-minute pre-election scandal or major event intended to sway voters.
To avoid such allegations of political manipulation of cases, the Justice Department has long followed a policy against making potentially influential filings within 60 or 90 days of an election. One section of the Justice Department manual states“Federal prosecutors… may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election.”
Jack Smith, however, has long dismissed such considerations. For years, Smith has been unrelenting in his demands for a trial before the election. He has even demanded that Donald Trump be barred from standard appellate options in order to expedite his trial. Smith never fully explained the necessity of holding a trial before the election beyond suggesting that voters should see the trial and the results — assaulting the very premise of the Justice Department’s rule against such actions just before elections.
After the Supreme Court rendered parts of his indictment against Trump presumptively unconstitutional, Smith made clear that he was prepared to prosecute Trump up to the very day of his inauguration. True to his reputation and record, Smith refused to drop the main allegations against Trump to avoid official decisions or acts that the court found to be protected in Trump v. United States. Instead, he stripped out some prior evidence linked to Trump’s presidency, including witnesses serving in the White House. Yet the same underlying allegations remain. Smith just repeatedly uses references to Trump as acting as “a private citizen.”
It is like a customer complaining that he did not order a Coke and the waiter pouring it into a Mountain Dew bottle and saying, “Done!”
Smith even refused to drop the obstruction of official proceedings, despite another recent Supreme Court decision (Fischer v. United States) rendering that charge presumptively invalid.
Smith is making his case not to Judge Tanya Chutkan, but to America’s voters. Chutkan has consistently ruled with Smith to help him expedite the case. She permitted his hastened “rocket docket” despite declaring that she would not consider the election schedule as a factor in the pace of filings or even of the trial itself.
For critics, Judge Chutkan has proven far too motivated in the case. Indeed, many thought that she should have recused herself given her statement from a sentencing hearing of a Jan. 6 rioter in 2022. Chutkan said that the rioters “were there in fealty, in loyalty, to one man — not to the Constitution.” She added then “[i]t’s a blind loyalty to one person who, by the way, remains free to this day.” That “one person” was then brought to her courtroom for trial by Smith.
In their latest move, Chutkan and Smith used the Supreme Court decision to file a type of preemptive defense — an excuse to lay out the allegations against Trump in a 165-page filing filled with damaging accounts and testimonials against Trump, just weeks ahead of the election.
Even Chutkin herself acknowledged that Smith’s request was “procedurally irregular,” but she still allowed it. This was a premature exercise that would ordinarily occur months later, after defense filings. She could have scheduled such filings just a few weeks from now. She could have easily kept the filing under seal to avoid the appearance of political machinations. But the political effect appears to be the point. Chutkin again selected the most politically impactful option, at Smith’s urging.
This was so“irregular” that ordinarily anti-Trump legal analysts, such as CNN’s senior legal analyst Elie Honig, denounced Smith’s filing as “an unprincipled, norm-breaking practice.” He added that “Smith has essentially abandoned any pretense; he’ll bend any rule, switch up on any practice — so long as he gets to chip away at Trump’s electoral prospects.”
Others, as expected, applauded the filing as not just well-directed but well-timed. Smith was making his closing election argument to voters because he knows that the 2024 election will be the largest jury verdict in history. If voters reelect Trump, then neither Chutkin nor Smith will likely see a jury in the case. This is why they must convict Trump now in the public eye, or else admit to an effective acquittal by plebiscite.
Their timing could well backfire. The weaponization of the legal system is central to this election, including the role of the Justice Department in pushing the debunked Russia-collusion allegations from the 2016 race. For many, the content of Smith’s filing is not nearly as important as the time stamp over the case caption. Titled a “Motion for Immunity Determination,” it seems more like a “Motion for an Election Determination.”
Smith’s raw political calculation should be troubling for anyone who values the rule of law. None of this excuses anything in these allegations against Trump. But the most disturbing part of Smith’s October Surprise was that it was not in the least bit surprising.
Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens.
Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom. That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.
She was joined recently by another former democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who called for government crackdowns on free speech. Other democrats have praised Brazil for banning X. For her part, Clinton praised the anti-free speech efforts in California and New York and called for the rest of the country to replicate the approach of those states.
Clinton added a particularly illuminating line that said the quiet part out loud. This is all about power and the fear that she and others will “lose control” over speech:
“Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.”
Clinton continues to offer a textbook example of the anti-free speech narrative. While seeking sweeping censorship for anything deemed disinformation, Clinton cites specific examples that are already barred under federal law like child porn.
Despite the amplified message on sites like CNN, most citizens may not be as aggrieved as Clinton that she and her allies could “lose total control” over the Internet. The greater fear is that she and her allies could regain control of social media. The Internet is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press. That is precisely why figures like Clinton are panicked over the inability to control it.
If citizens remain true to their values and this indispensable right, Clinton will hopefully continue to face “a long and difficult road to getting anything done” in limiting the free speech of her fellow citizens.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Vance demolished Walz in the last debate, and all he used was the truth, while Walz fumbled under the weight of his lies.
Tim Walz melts down at debate when pressed to explain his China trip, admits he ‘misspoke’
By Mariane Angela – Oct 2, 2024
When confronted with the discrepancy by the host, Walz responded with a lengthy discourse on his background and various accomplishments. (Daily Caller News Foundation) — Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz faltered when pressed to clarify his previous claims that he was present in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 during the vice presidential debate against Republican Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance. Despite earlier claims of being in the region during the pivotal events of spring 1989, credible reports from Minnesota Public Radio and other outlets have shown that Walz did not travel to Asia until several months later, as pointed out by the debate host. When confronted with the discrepancy by the host, Walz responded with a lengthy discourse on his background and various… (READ MORE)
A.F. Branco Cartoon – After Kamala’s Administration blew all the FEMA money on illegals, she’s offering $750.00 to the victims of Helene. Billions have gone to Ukraine, and now millions are going to Lebanon.
Smash-Mouth Marxism: Kamala Harris Brags Online About Sending $157 Million to Lebanon As Southeast US Suffers Through Historic Flooding and FEMA Admits It Blew Money on Illegals
By Jim Hoft – Oct. 6, 2024
This is what you call smash-mouth Marxism. They mock you in your suffering because they know they can. As long as elections can be stolen this is what you can expect from your ‘representative’ government. On Saturday, Kamala Harris bragged online about the Biden regime sending $157 million to war-ravaged Lebanon. She then added that over $385 million has gone to assist Hezbollah-ruled Lebanon over the past year. (READ MORE)
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
Top Stories • MSNBC Producer Admits They’re Doing All They Can to Help Kamala Win • Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Faces Lawsuit From Model Who Says He Pressured Her to Have Abortion • ACLU Loses Attempt to Silence Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Radical Abortion Amendment • Families are Not Moving to Minnesota, They Reject Tim Walz’s Far Left State
More Pro-Life News • Hispanic Voters Favor Trump Over Harris Because Kamala is Radically Pro-Abortion • Mike Huckabee: Christians Must Vote This Election Because We’re in a “Spiritual Battle” • Melania Trump Reportedly Supports Abortion in New Book • Charges Dropped Against Pro-Life Advocates for Protesting Abortion Biz • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Residents in the Lake Lure area of North Carolina recounted the powerful floods that struck last week. John Payne, a volunteer firefighter who was born and raised in one of the hardest hit areas says the village ‘will bounce back.’ (AP video by Erik Verduzco and Mike Stewart/Production by Takahiro Kinoshita)
A mass of debris, including overturned pontoon boats and splintered wooden docks and tree trunks, covered the surface of Lake Lure, a picturesque spot tucked between the mountains outside Asheville.
3 of 24 |
Debris is strewn on the lake in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Lake Lure, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
4 of 24 |
A home is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
5 of 24 |
Two Sheriff deputies walk on the main street in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
6 of 24 |
Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
7 of 24 |
Homes are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
8 of 24 |
Iraq War veteran Chris Canada, right, stands among debris resting on a bridge in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
9 of 24 |
Mayor Peter O’Leary, right, and town administrator Stephen Duncan confer over papers outside the volunteer fire department in Chimney Rock Village, N.C., on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Allen. G. Breed)
10 of 24 |
Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
11 of 24 |
An American flag flies half-staff on top of Chimney Rock mountain in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
12 of 24 |
Workers survey damage where a road once existed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
13 of 24 |
Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
14 of 24 |
A road sign sticks in the mud where a road was in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
15 of 24 |
Homes are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
16 of 24 |
Business are seen in a debris field in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
17 of 24 |
Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
18 of 24 |
Debris is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
19 of 24 |
Businesses are seen in a debris field in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
20 of 24 |
Debris covers a field in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
21 of 24 |
A washed out road is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
22 of 24 |
Homes are seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
23 of 24 |
The town of Chimney Rock, N.C., is seen after flash flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
24 of 24 |
Volunteer firefighter Ric Thurlby checks messages as Hickory Nut Falls flows above and the ruined town of Chimney Rock Village, N.C., lies below on Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Allen G. Breed)
CHIMNEY ROCK VILLAGE, N.C. (AP) — The stone tower that gave this place its name was nearly a half billion years in the making — heated and thrust upward from deep in the Earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water. But in just a few minutes, nature undid most of what it has taken humans a century and a quarter to build in the North Carolina mountain town of Chimney Rock.
“It feels like I was deployed, like, overnight and woke up in … a combat zone,” Iraq War veteran Chris Canada said as a massive twin-propped Chinook helicopter passed over his adopted hometown. “I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”
Nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) from where Hurricane Helene made landfall Sept. 26 along Florida’s Big Bend, the hamlet of about 140 souls on the banks of the Broad River has been all but wiped from the map. The backs of restaurants and gift shops that boasted riverfront balconies dangle ominously in mid-air. The Hickory Nut Brewery, opened when Rutherford County went “wet” and started serving alcohol about a decade ago, collapsed on Wednesday, nearly a week after the storm.
The buildings across Main Street, while still standing, are choked with several feet of reddish-brown muck. A sign on the Chimney Sweeps souvenir shop says, “We are open during construction.”
In another section of town, the houses that weren’t swept away perch precariously near the edge of a scoured riverbank. It is where the town’s only suspected death — an elderly woman who refused entreaties to evacuate — occurred.
“Literally, this river has moved,” village administrator Stephen Duncan said as he drove an Associated Press reporter through the dust-blown wreckage of Chimney Rock Village on Wednesday. “We saw a 1,000-year event. A geological event.”
A monster wall of water strikes Chimney Rock hours after making landfall in Florida
About eight hours after Helene made landfall in Florida, Chimney Rock volunteer firefighter John Payne was responding to a possible gas leak when he noticed water spilling over US 64/74, the main road into town. It was just after 7 a.m.
“The actual hurricane hadn’t even come through and hit yet,” he said.
Payne, 32, who’s lived in this valley his entire life, aborted the call and rushed back up the hill to the fire station, which was moved to higher ground following a devastating 1996 flood. Former chief Joseph “Buck” Meliski, who worked that earlier flood, scoffed.
“There’s no way it’s hitting that early,” Payne recalled the older man saying.
But when Payne showed him a video he’d just shot — of water topping the bridge to the Hickory Nut Falls Family Campground — the former chief’s jaw dropped.
“We’re in for it, boys,” Meliski told Payne and the half dozen or so others gathered there.
Suddenly, the ground beneath them began shaking — like the temblors that sometimes rock the valley, but much stronger. By then, muddy water was seeping under the back wall of the firehouse. Payne looked down and saw what he estimated to be a 30-foot-high (nine-meter-high) wall of water, tossing car-sized boulders as it raced toward the town. It appeared as if the wave was devouring houses, then spitting them out.
“It’s not water at that point,” Payne said. “It’s mud, this thick concrete-like material, you know what I mean? And whatever it hits, it’s taking.”
A house hit the bridge from which he’d been filming not 20 minutes earlier. The span just “imploded.” Payne later found its steel beams “bent in horseshoe shapes around boulders.”
At the firehouse, some business owners among the group began “crying hysterically,” Payne said. Others just stood in mute disbelief. The volunteers lost communications during the storm. But when the winds finally began to quiet down around 11 a.m., Payne said, the radios began “blowing up with calls.”
Workers survey damage where a road once existed in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Scenic Lake Lure becomes a wet pit of rubble
The pieces of what had been Chimney Rock Village were now on their way to the neighboring town of Lake Lure, which played a starring role as stand-in for a Catskills resort in the 1987 Patrick Swayze summer romance film, “Dirty Dancing.”
Tracy Stevens, 55, a bartender at the Hickory Nut, took refuge at the Lake Lure Inn, where she also worked. She watched as the detritus from Chimney Rock and beyond came pouring into the marina, tossing aside boats and thrusting the metal sections of the floating Town Center Walkway upward like the folds of a map.
“It looked like a toilet bowl flushing,” she said. “I could see cars, tops of houses. It was the craziest.”
A home is seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Wednesday, Oct. 2, 2024, in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Some of the debris coalesced into a massive jam between the two bridges linking the towns — a utilitarian concrete affair carrying Memorial Highway across the Broad River, and an elegant three-arched span known as the Flowering Bridge.
After 85 years carrying traffic into Chimney Rock, the 1925 viaduct was converted into a verdant walkway festooned with more than 2,000 species of plants. Now partially collapsed, the bridge’s remains are draped in a tangled mass of vines, roots and tree branches.
Some residents see signs of hope amid almost complete destruction of their town
Canada, 43, who co-owns a stage rental and event production company, was at a Charlotte music festival when the storm hit. Returning to uniformed troops and armored personnel carriers kicking up dust in the streets awakened memories of his three combat tours in the Middle East.
“I saw the whole war and I’ve been through many hurricanes,” said Canada, an Army airborne veteran. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Canada and his wife, Barbie, moved here with their two daughters in October 2021 from South Carolina, in part to get away from hurricanes. Barbie had vacationed here as a child, and it was close to the Veterans Administration hospital in Asheville.
As he walked the banks of the Broad on Wednesday, Chris Canada found himself sniffing at the warm air for the telltale odor of death.
And yet, all around are signs of hope.
Payne — who climbs the rock in full gear each Sept. 11 to honor first responders who died in the Twin Towers attacks — was heartened to see members of the New York City Fire Department in his town helping with door-to-door searches.
“We’re more hard-headed than these rocks are,” said Payne, whose day job is as a site coordinator for a fast-food chain. “So, it’s going to take more than this to scare us off and run us out. It’ll be a while, but we’ll be back. Don’t count us out.”
Outside the Mountain Traders shop, someone has leaned a large wooden Sasquatch cutout against a utility pole, the words “Chimney Rock Strong” painted in bright blue.
When park employees cut their way to the top of the mountain and raised the American flag on Monday, Duncan says the people below cheered, and some wept.
“It was spectacular,” he said.
Iraq War veteran Chris Canada, right, stands among debris resting on a bridge in Chimney Rock Village, N.C. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
Mayor says his little town has the spirit and determination necessary to rebuild
The flag is flying at half staff. But Mayor Peter O’Leary said it’s that spirit that will bring Chimney Rock Village back.
The town’s legacy of hospitality and entrepreneurial spirit dates back to the late 1800s, when a local family began charging visitors 25 cents for a horseback ride up the mountain, according to brief online history by village resident R. J. Wald. It soon became one of North Carolina’s first bona fide tourist attractions.
O’Leary came to town in 1990 to take a job as park manager, before it became part of the state parks system. Two years later, he and his wife opened Bubba O’Leary’s General Store, named for their yellow Labrador retriever.
“Most of these people here, if you look around, almost all of them are from somewhere else,” he said as he stood outside the firehouse, the waters of the 404-foot (123-meter) Hickory Nut Falls gushing forth from the ridge high above. “Why’d they come here? They came here and fell in love with it. It gets ahold of you. …
“It got ahold of me.”
The 1927 portion of the general store has caved in, but O’Leary believes the larger addition built in 2009 is salvageable. Duncan, who drafted the village charter back in 1990, sees this as an opportunity to “take advantage of the new geography” and build a better town. But for some, like innkeeper and restaurateur Nick Sottile, 35, the path forward is hard to see.
When Helene hit, Sottile and wife Kristen were vacationing in the Turks and Caicos Islands — their first break since October 2020, when they opened their Broad River Inn and Stagecoach Pizza Kitchen in what’s believed to be the village’s oldest building.
In photos taken from the street, things looked remarkably intact. But when Sottile returned home and walked around to the river side, his heart sank.
“The back of the building is, like, a whole section of it is gone,” the South Florida native said Friday. “It’s not even safe to go in there right now.”
About all that’s left of the adjacent Chimney Rock Adventure miniature golf course is the sign.
“You can’t even rebuild,” Sottile said. “Because there’s no land.”
Sottile has been hearing horror stories from fellow business owners about denied insurance claims. Without help, he said he has no money to rebuild. But for now, he’s just volunteering with the fire department and trying not to think too far into the future.
“This is a small town, but this is, this is HOME,” he said. “Everybody helps everybody, and I know we’ll get through this. I know we’ll rebuild. I’m just praying that we can rebuild with US here to see it.”
___
AP National Writer Tim Sullivan contributed from Minneapolis.
It’s not exactly breaking news that MSNBC is dedicated to advancing Democrat Party power, but it is truly fascinating to witness one of its producers so openly disdain the channel and its viewers.
On Thursday journalist James O’Keefe released another sting operation-style video that shows a man identified as MSNBC producer Basel Hamden chatting with a woman who is surreptitiously recording the conversation. Hamden talks at length about MSNBC as less of a news operation and more of a hype machine for the national Democrat agenda, with amplifying party messaging as its sole purpose.
When asked about the ways MSNBC has been able to “help” Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, Hamden says, “They’re doing all they can,” adding, “What her message of the day is, is their message of the day.”
He says MSNBC’s reporters and anchors are “often saying the same exact things” as Democrat Party leaders. “This news network is indistinguishable from the party,” he says. When Hamden’s undercover interlocutor calls that “bad journalism,” he replies, “They’ve made their viewers dumber over the years.”
BREAKING: @MSNBC Producer Admits MSNBC Is 'Doing All They Can to Help’ the Harris Campaign
During an undercover date with an OMG journalist, Basel Hamdan (@BaselYHamdan), a writer and producer for MSNBC’s show “Ayman,” (@AymanMSNBC) was asked what the network has done to assist… pic.twitter.com/y9Yk8o1UX7
To be fair to the poor schlub, he showed some loyalty to his employer by accusing MSNBC’s competitor, Fox News, of producing “racist propaganda.” So at least he has that going for him.
I’m sure this is a highly embarrassing affair for Hamden, but he should know that he’s done a good thing, even if it was unintentional. He told the truth out loud about MSNBC’s real purpose (aiding Democrats) and the real consequence of its programming (dumber viewers).
Tech billionaire Elon Musk took to X on Friday afternoon to claim the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is “actively blocking” volunteers who try to help the struggling citizens of western North Carolina in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
“Just received this note from a SpaceX engineer helping on the ground in North Carolina,” Musk wrote. “@FEMA is not merely failing to adequately help people in trouble but is actively blocking citizens who try to help!”
“Hey Elon, update here on site of Asheville, NC,” Musk said his employee wrote. “We have powered up two large operating bases for choppers to deliver goods into hands. We’ve deployed 300+ starlinks and outpour is it has saved many lives.’
“The big issue is FEMA is actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own,” the post continued. “It’s very real and scary how much they have taken control to stop people helping. We are blocked now on the shipments of new starlinks coming in until we get an escort from the fire dept. but that may not be enough.”
Musk’s allegation is not the only report of volunteers being blocked from assisting in the North Carolina rescue operations. A helicopter pilot hailing from South Carolina said he was threatened with arrestover the weekend for his efforts to rescue people trapped in the mountains.
Since making landfall over a week ago, Hurricane Helene has been blamed for the deaths of more than 200 people across several states in the Southeast, including North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia.
Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.
“Vote here” signage is stored at a warehouse at the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center ahead of the 2024 elections in Phoenix on June 3, 2024. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
Jason Hopkins is a reporter covering immigration issues for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—America First Legal on Thursday announced a lawsuit against Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes for refusing to hand over the names of over 200,000 registered voters who have allegedly not provided proof of citizenship.
Fontes is breaking the law by refusing to comply with a records request that demands the names of roughly 218,000 individuals who are registered to vote but did not provide proof of citizenship, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit comes just weeks before Election Day, with former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remaining in a dead heat in the state.
“America First Legal continues to lead the fight for election integrity,” Stephen Miller, America First Legal president and former senior adviser in the Trump administration, said in a press release. “We are suing the state of Arizona for refusing to provide the list of 218,000 voters who failed or refused to establish citizenship.”
“It is absolutely imperative that we stop the dire threat of illegal alien voting, which is the gravest form of foreign election interference,” Miller continued.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer identified in September a glitch in the voter roll system that marked more than 97,000 registered voters as having provided documentary proof of citizenship—which is required under Arizona law—even though these individuals had not done so. Richer filed an emergency petition in the Arizona Supreme Court on Sept. 17 in order to prevent these voter registrants from participating in local and state elections.
Fontes announced Monday that his office had discovered an additional “set of approximately 120,000 Arizonans who may be affected by a data coding oversight within [the Arizona Department of Transportation’s] Motor Vehicle Division and Arizona registration databases.”
The recent disclosure puts the total number of registered voters in the state who allegedly did not provide proof of citizenship up to roughly 218,000. The 2020 presidential election in Arizona was decided by a margin of less than 11,000 votes.
Immediately after Richer’s lawsuit, America First Legal filed a public records request asking the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office to hand over the list of all individuals who had unlawfully registered to vote, according to a press release from the organization. Fontes denied the request, alleging that disclosure of the names would lead to their harassment and that compiling the list would be too burdensome for staff.
America First Legal argues that Arizona’s public records request laws require Fontes to produce this type of information when requested.
“There have been major failures in the administration of just about every general election in Arizona from 2016 until now,” stated James Rogers, America First Legal senior counsel. “And every time anyone expresses concern, how does Secretary Fontes react? Victim blaming.”
“That is not what Arizonans expect from their elected leaders. The law requires Secretary Fontes to produce these records, and AFL will work to hold him accountable until he does,” Rogers continued.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, also known as “EZAZ.org.”
Fontes did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
MUST LISTEN 🚨 Kamala Harris Admin ARRESTED a man for bringing helicopter full of supplies to Hurricane Helene victims
“There was a man that took off yesterday in his helicopter to go up in the mountains to drop off food. He landed and got arrested and said he was interfering… pic.twitter.com/I0OjFyVqMq
“It’s over, the choice is clear. You don’t have to like him but you see what America first was and now we see what America last is. You can’t defend this administration.”
WEAPONIZATION: Elon Musk posted that one of his SpaceX engineers on the ground in North Carolina is reporting that FEMA is blocking and seizing shipments of aid including Starlink receivers. The engineer reports that all Starlink shipments are on hold until they can get an escort… https://t.co/E3PqcsmHSapic.twitter.com/YwkzZjjsU1
This is disturbing. Land grab of Chimney Rock, NC. Town to be bulldozed before removal of the deceased. Sicking and disrespectful. America is truly lost. Lord help us. pic.twitter.com/lXMg2nvWx9
Biden has ordered a stand down of over a thousand military helicopter crews in the south. Every branch is reporting that they are waiting on orders while people die. This is an unprecedented action by the Biden/Harris crime syndicate. The hurricane conveniently destroyed the… https://t.co/YdcE7y3Tpd
A group of private helicopter pilots working *on their own* at great risk to rescue people deep in the mountains of storm-ravaged Western North Carolina. Their time, money, heart, soul. Their day started like this. pic.twitter.com/XUChBt8AjW
Below is my column in USA Today on the most chilling moment from the Vance-Walz debate when the Democratic nominee showed why he is part of the dream ticket for the anti-free speech movement.
Here is the column:
In the vice-presidential debate Tuesday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pulled the fire alarm. His opponent, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, cited the massive system of censorship supported by Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate. Walz proceeded to quote the line from a 1919 case in which Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said you do not have the right to falsely yell fire in a crowded theater. It is the favorite mantra of the anti-free speech movement. It also is fundamentally wrong.
‘Fire in a theater’ case supported government censorship
As I discuss in the book, the line was largely lifted from a brief in an earlier free speech case. It has since become the rationale for politicians and pundits seeking to curtail free speech in America.
For example, when I testified last year before Congress against a censorship system that has been described by one federal court as “similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth,’” Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., interjected with the fire-in-a-theater question to say such censorship is needed and constitutional. In other words, the internet is now a huge, crowded theater and those with opposing views are shouting fire.
Goldman and Walz both cited a case in which socialists Charles Schenck and Elizabeth Baer were arrested and convicted of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Their “crime” was to pass out flyers in opposition to the military draft during World War I. Schenck and Baer called on their fellow citizens not to “submit to intimidation” and to “assert your rights.” They argued, “If you do not assert and support your rights, you are helping to deny or disparage rights which it is the solemn duty of all citizens and residents of the United States to retain.” They also described the military draft as “involuntary servitude.”
In the vice-presidential debate, Walz showed that he and other Democratic leaders most certainly do need a class in First Amendment law. As I have said, the Biden-Harris administration has proved to be the most anti-free speech administration in two centuries. You have to go back to John Adams’ administration to find the equal of this administration.
Harris has been an outspoken champion of censorship in an administration that supports targeting disinformation, misinformation and “malinformation.” That last category was defined by the Biden administration as information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
In the debate, Walz also returned to his favorite dismissal of censorship objections by saying that it is all just inflammatory rhetoric. Recently, Walz went on MSNBC to support censoring disinformation and declared, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.” That is entirely untrue and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the right called “indispensable” by the Supreme Court. Even after some of us condemned his claim as ironically dangerous disinformation, Walz continues to repeat it.
Free speech advocates view Harris as a threat
This is why, for the free speech community, the prospect of a Harris-Walz administration is chilling. Where President Joe Biden was viewed as supporting censorship out of political opportunism, Harris and Walz are viewed as true believers.
We are living through the most dangerous anti-free speech movement in American history. We have never before faced the current alliance of government, corporate, academic and media forces aligned against free speech. A Harris-Walz administration with a supportive Congress could make this right entirely dispensable.
Others are laying the groundwork for precisely that moment. University of Michigan Law School professor and MSNBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade has said that free speech “can also be our Achilles’ heel.”
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, wrote a New York Times op-ed with the headline, “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” He told readers that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.”
Walz said in the debate that Vice President Harris is promoting the “politics of joy.” Indeed, the wrong people are perfectly ecstatic. Harris and Walz are the dream team for the anti-free speech movement.
Top Stories • Doctor Left This Baby to Die After He Survived a Late-Term Abortion • Focus Groups Confirm JD Vance Defeated Tim Walz in Debate • Kamala Harris Would be a Disaster for Unborn Babies • JD Vance Was Right. Democrats are the Radical Extremists on Abortion
More Pro-Life News • Doctors Euthanize 17-Year-Old Girl Who Had Depression and Anxiety • JD Vance Shares How Prayer Helped Him Overcome Anxiety Before the Debate • Kamala Harris Had This Concentration Camp Survivor Arrested for Protesting Abortion • Planned Parenthood Wants to Force Every American to Fund Abortions • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas is pleading with lawmakers to send the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) more money after the disaster relief agency emptied the coffers to provide services for illegal immigrants.
“FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season,” Mayorkas told reporters on Air Force One Wednesday, with hurricane season running from June 1 through Nov. 30.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” he said, after Hurricane Helene brought devastation to the southeastern United States.
The storm crashed into Florida as a Category 4 hurricane last week and poured a record-breaking 40 trillion gallons of water across the South, washing away entire Appalachian towns. Ryan Cole, the assistant director for emergency services in Buncombe County where Asheville became isolated due to broken roads and no power or cell service, characterized the aftermath as “Biblical.”
“You’ve heard us say, ‘catastrophic devastation within our county.’ I would go a little bit further and say we have Biblical devastation through the county,” Cole said Sunday. “We’ve had Biblical flooding here, and it has been extremely significant.”
But while communities across southern Appalachia scramble to rebuild following the torrential downpour that killed roughly 200 people, federal relief efforts have come up short. One woman named Alyse Adams, who spoke to NBC News about her family stuck in the North Carolina mountains, said she’s been stunned by the slow response from the Biden-Harris administration.
“I don’t know how you did not have a formal press conference or something from either President Biden or Kamala Harris,” Adams said. “FEMA is not on the ground there at all. They are not in these cities, not in these towns, and not in these villages.”
This woman has family trapped in Spruce Pine, North Carolina for 4 days… She just called out Biden and Harris live on NBC: pic.twitter.com/FFT11nuOPM
While the emergency response agency is typically proactive, with pre-staged supplies ready for immediate rescue operations, that same support was clearly not available to the Appalachian towns where Hurricane Helene wrought havoc. Instead, the Biden-Harris administration restructured FEMA to provide services for illegal migrants with a new bureaucratic mandate to instill “equity as a foundation of emergency management.” Storm preparedness ranks as a third priority for the disaster relief task force under “lead[ing] whole of community in climate resilience.”
According to the government’s website, FEMA has spent more than $1 billion “to provide humanitarian services to noncitizen migrants following their release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” under the “Shelter and Services Program” just within the last two years. The agency allocated nearly $364 million to the program in the fiscal year 2023 and $650 million for 2024.
“Over the last 4 years the Biden-Harris admin has steadily transformed FEMA — the agency responsible for responding to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene — into an illegal alien resettlement agency that emphasizes DEI over public safety,”reported America First Legal, a conservative non-profit. AFL published a series on online posts outlining where FEMA spent tax dollars meant to assist Americans in the aftermath of major storms and hurricanes.
“The Shelter and Services Program is designed to exclusively provide shelter and services to illegal aliens,” AFL reported, with millions in grants spent to groups primarily across the Southwest. AFL also highlighted the “Emergency Food and Shelter Program” as a “separate program” that has given $685 million “to fund illegal aliens.”
/4 Moreover, the Emergency Food and Shelter Program has been reshaped to provide funding to “families and individuals encountered by the Department of Homeland Security” – aka illegal aliens.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, FEMA gets most of its funding from supplemental appropriations bills passed by lawmakers following natural disasters. This hurricane season, however, has only brought two major storms to the U.S. that caused widespread devastation: Helene and Beryl, which hit Texas in June. Yet Mayorkas is now demanding more funding for FEMA after the administration diverted the agency’s resources for the continued migrant crisis under President Biden’s “border czar,” Kamala Harris.
“We have, of course, made a significant request of Congress with respect to stable funding for the Federal Emergency Management Administration, which should not be a political issue,” Mayorkas said Wednesday. “This is something that Americans need desperately.”
Americans in the washed-out towns of southern Appalachia also need the support of their federal government more than the illegal border crossers in California and Texas, desperately.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist and the author of Social Justice Redux, a conservative newsletter on culture, health, and wellness. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com. Sign up for Tristan’s email newsletter here.
The most important exchange in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media. Not surprisingly, that’s because it makes Walz look like an authoritarian and a fool in one fell swoop:
J.D. Vance: The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use …
Tim Walz: …[inaudible] threatening or hate speech …
J.D. Vance: … the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.
Tim Walz:You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.
J.D. Vance: Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks.
CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell:Senator, the governor does have the floor.
Tim Walz:Sorry.
Ok, let’s unpack what happened here. Walz challenged Vance on Trump’s questioning of the 2020 election results and Jan. 6, and Vance countered by saying that if Walz and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were so concerned about the fate of democracy they wouldn’t be so adamantly pro-censorship. Specifically, Walz has previously said, quite incorrectly from any legal or moral standpoint, that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation.”
Walz interjects to, near as I can tell, try and clarify that he was also talking about limiting “threatening” words or “hate speech.” Interestingly, I looked at multiple debate transcriptions, and none of them had this quite audible interjection included — though the first word or two is hard to discern, the part about “threatening or hate speech”is quite clear. In any event, to the extent that Walz is trying to defend himself he’s doing an awful job.
The legal standards for “threatening” speech or incitement might be clearer, but it’s still a fraught issue. As for “hate speech,” he has no idea what he’s talking about. You may not like it, but “hate speech” is absolutely protected speech. The First Amendment is absolutely a right to offend people without legal sanction, even gratuitously. Otherwise, policing speech is just a tool for government oppression. After all, who defines what constitutes “hate speech?” Walz seems to be suggesting he wants to throw people in jail for not using preferred pronouns and the like.
But the coup de grace for sinister ignorance is Walz saying, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.” Now if you know anything about First Amendment issues, the “fire in a crowded theater” line makes civil libertarians break out in hives. Somewhat surprisingly, The Atlantic had a very good article a few years back about the origin of the phrase:
In reality, though, shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater is not a broad First Amendment loophole permitting the regulation of speech. The phrase originated in a case that did not involve yelling or fires or crowds or theaters. Charles T. Schenck, the general secretary of the U.S. Socialist Party, was convicted in a Philadelphia federal court for violating the Espionage Act by printing leaflets that criticized the military draft as unconstitutional.
In a six-paragraph opinion issued on March 3, 1919, Justice Holmes wrote for a unanimous Court that Schenck’s conviction was justified because the leaflets advocated for obstructing military recruiting and therefore constituted a “clear and present danger” during a time of war. “We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights,” Holmes wrote. “But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
The rest of the article is worth reading for the full history, but in short, arresting people for handing out anti-war literature was justified by comparing it to shouting fire in a crowded theater. Which is unconscionable. Holmes himself later did an about-face on his own reasoning a year later, and the Supreme Court decision above was overturned by the court quite definitively by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. “Fire in a crowded theater” was never a reliable “Supreme Court test” as Walz put it, and it’s been totally inoperable as a matter of law since Walz was in kindergarten.
This is not some small matter here. I have no interest in defending what happened on Jan. 6 (though I do think a great many people have been subject to grossly unfair legal penalties for their participation in the riot, and that this has been done out of partisan spite). But Vance is absolutely correct when he says the Democrat Party’s embrace of censorship is far more threatening than anything on Jan. 6.
How do I know this? Well, to start, unlike Jan. 6, censorship has affected far more people and is an ongoing concern. This publication is involved in a lawsuit with The Daily Wire and the state of Texas against the State Department for promoting Big Tech censorship tools. The State Department justifies what they’re doing as part of a frightening attempt to police “misinformation” — which is routinely defined as any news that liberal academics and federal bureaucrats don’t think is politically expedient.
Earlier this week, Rep. Adam Schiff, who knowingly spread lies about President Trump treasonously colluding with Russia to undermine a fairly elected president, sent a letter to tech companies telling them to censor“false, hateful, and violent content” because it is a “threat” to the upcoming election. But who decides what content is false, hateful, or violent here? Adam Schiff is an especially unworthy judge of these matters, but then again, there’s no elected official that should be deciding who gets to say what. And sending letters that attempt to intimidate private companies into preventing Americans from exercising their most fundamental constitutional right … well, perhaps we live in more civil times, but I have an idea of how the Sons of Liberty would have responded to such a politician.
And it’s not just politicians, the First Amendment is also being actively undermined by the people who, in theory, have the biggest stake in protecting it. Our corporate media’s silence is further proof they quietly agree that the censorship of unruly citizens is necessary. After all, if they continue to do things like refuse a vaccine that doesn’t actually prevent transmission of the disease, stubbornly point out the octogenarian the White House has dementia, and won’t vote for who they’re told to —how exactly do they expect journalism’s current business model to succeed?
The fact remains that fewer people are going to read this very article because it’s being actively suppressed by Big Tech right now. Even if I didn’t have the receipts to show that this publication was being intentionally and unconstitutionally singled out for suppression by the feds, just the fact I typed “vaccine” in the preceding paragraph was probably enough to alert The Algorithms such that this article will forever show up on page six of any relevant search results. The writer in me wants to note the twisted irony of an article warning about the obliteration of the First Amendment being actively censored; the citizen in me just understands this as simple tyranny.
Unlike so many of my peers — alas, I think my parents have taken to telling their friends I sell used cars to spare themselves the shame of admitting I’m a journalist — I’m not going to tell you how to vote. But it is entirely fair to say that Tim Walz and his ilk do not understand the First Amendment, and they sure as hell don’t respect it.
And when people like that get in power, we all lose.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Below is my column in the New York Post on the recent remarks of former Secretary of State John Kerry to the World Economic Forum, the latest in an array of powerful American politicians warning about the dangers of free speech and calling for government controls. He joins his fellow former Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton in reaching out to the global elite for help in censoring their fellow Americans.
Here is the column:
If you want to know how hostile the global elite are to free speech, look no further than John Kerry’s recent speech to the World Economic Forum. Rather than extol the benefits of democratic liberty versus dictatorships and oligarchs, Kerry called the First Amendment a “major block” to keeping people from believing the “wrong” things.
“You know, there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
“So, what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
Free rein on social media
The “freedom” to be won in this election is to liberate officials who like himself can set about controlling what can be said, read or heard. Kerry insisted that the problem with social media is that no one is controlling what they can say or read.“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue,” he said.
“It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.”
Kerry continued: “Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are.”
It is not clear when in our history we allowed “referees” to “determine what is a fact.”
Since the First Amendment has been in place since 1791, it is hard to imagine when referees were used in conformity with our Constitution. The Founders would have been repulsed by the idea of a “truth arbiter.” Yet it was a pitch that clearly went over big with the crowd at the World Economic Forum.
Located in Geneva, Switzerland, it is funded by over 1,000 member companies around the world. It is the perfect body for the selection of our new governing “arbiters.” The greatest irony was that, after fearmongering about this supposed parade of horrible that comes from free speech, Kerry insisted, “If we could strip away some of the fearmongering that’s taking place and get down to the realities of what’s here for people, this is the biggest economic opportunity.”
It was like Ed Wood denouncing cheesy jump scares in horror movies. Kerry is only the latest Democratic leader or pundit to denounce the First Amendment.
In my book on free speech, I discuss the growing anti-free speech movement being led by law professors and supported by both politicians and journalists. They include Michigan law professor and MSNBC commentator Barbara McQuade, who has called free speech America’s “Achilles’ heel.”
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, wrote an op-ed declaring “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” He explained that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.”
George Washington University Law’s Mary Ann Franks complains that the First Amendment (and also the Second) is too “aggressively individualistic” and endangers “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare.”
‘Will we break the fever?’
Kerry hit all of the top talking points for the anti-free speech movement. He portrayed the First Amendment as hopelessly out of date and dangerous. He argued that citizens would be far better off if an elite could tell them what was information and what was disinformation.
Other political contemporaries are working on the same problem. Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to use the Digital Services Act to force the censoring of Americans. She has also suggested the arrest of Americans who she views as spreading disinformation.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) has called for companies like Amazon to use enlightened algorithms to steer readers to “true” books on subjects like climate change to protect them from their own poor reading choices.
Kerry explained how the true heroes are those poor suffering government officials seeking to protect citizens from unbridled, unregulated thoughts:
“I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges they are facing, and to me, that is part of what this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?”
The “fever” of free speech is undeniably hard to break. You have to convince a free people to give up part of their freedom. To do so, they have to be very angry or very afraid. There is, of course, another possibility: that there is no existential danger of disinformation. Rather there are powerful figures who want to control speech in the world for their own purposes. These are the same rationales and the same voices that have been throughout our history for censorship.
Give me liberty
Each generation of government officials insists that they face some unprecedented threat, whether it was the printing press at the start of our republic or social media in this century. Only the solution remains the same: to hand over control of what we read or hear to a governing elite like Kerry.
In 1860, Frederick Douglass gave a “Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” and warned them that all of their struggles meant nothing if the “freedom of speech is struck down” because “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.” Douglass denounced those seeking to deny or limit free speech as making their “freedom a mockery.” Of course, Douglass knew nothing of social media, and he certainly never met the likes of John Kerry.
However, if we embrace our new arbiters of truth we deserve to be mocked as a people who held true freedom only to surrender it to a governing elite.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – After giving 174 billion to Ukraine, Biden tells flood victims of Helene, We’ve given all we have. It appears that Trump and Elon Musk acted more like effective leaders than Kamala or Biden. Kamala did pretend she was talking on the phone, not plugged in, though, while Biden was hanging out at the beach – Again.
Joe Biden Tells Americans Suffering in Flood Disaster Zone… “No.” There Won’t be More Resources Coming… “We’ve Given Them All We Have” (VIDEO)
By Jim Hoft – Sept 30, 2024 – The GAteway Pundit
Another devastating disaster hit the southern United States this week and the Biden-Harris administration is nowhere to be found. The Southeastern United States was plunged into devastation after Category 4 Hurricane Helene, the strongest hurricane to ever strike Florida’s Big Bend region, unleashed catastrophic destruction across six states. Helene’s ferocious winds and torrential rains have claimed at least 95 lives, left millions without power, and trapped countless families in floodwaters, particularly in North Carolina, where entire communities have been cut off from vital resources… READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
“They are literally allowing this people to fvcking die in the mountains right now because we can’t get helicopters.”
Jonathan Howard with the Florida State Guard Special Mission Unit who is assisting Aerial Recovery says they desperately NEED… pic.twitter.com/EtWrkYtYc4
Hurricane Helene: Tennessee Resident Says Tennessee/ FEMA Sending Out Text Messages Telling Everyone Do Not Help Neighbors In Need
Messages saying “We don't want you to donate stuff to other people. You need to just donate money and stuff to us and get your instructions from us… pic.twitter.com/gzuF8owjmF
MUST WATCH & MUST SHARE ! If you don’t fear the government yet , you will after watching this 👇 Apply logic to your question WHY ! So they can make life of disaster victims as miserable as possible ; where people give up , leave their homes never to return…. #AbandonedAmericapic.twitter.com/GtdzuTTBqz
Top Stories • Tim Walz Quotes Bible Verse About “Protecting the Least of These,” But Legalized Abortions Up to Birth • JD Vance Calls Out Tim Walz For Signing Bill Allowing Infanticide: “That is Fundamentally Barbaric” • Tim Walz Defends Signing Bill for Abortions Up to Birth • Tim Walz Calls Killing Babies in Abortions a “Basic Human Right”
More Pro-Life News • Ron DeSantis Declares “Protect Life Sunday” to Fight Pro-Abortion Ballot Measure • Kamala Harris Puts Three More Pro-Life Americans in Prison for Protesting Abortion • Minnesota Group Confirms Walz Covered Up His Record of Abortions Up to Birth and Infanticide • Ten Lies Tim Walz Told About Abortion During the Debate • Scroll Down for Several More Pro-Life News Stories
Looking for an inspiring and motivating speaker for your pro-life event? Don’t have much to spend on a high-priced speaker costing several thousand dollars? Contact news@lifenews.com about having LifeNews Editor Steven Ertelt speak at your event.
Comments or questions? Email us at news@lifenews.com. Copyright 2003-2024 LifeNews.com. All rights reserved. For information on advertising or reprinting news from LifeNews.com, email us.
Wow. The day after the Teamsters released their survey results showing 60% support among their members for Trump, a Steamfitters Union member announces that 70% of his members support Trump.
The vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night was staggeringly one-sided.
Sen. JD Vance was poised, calm, friendly, likable, and in control of the facts and himself.
By contrast, Gov. Tim Walz began the debate so nervous it was painful to watch. Then he made a series of mistakes which were cumulatively disqualifying. It was hard to believe he is on a national ticket.
Callista and I went to bed on Tuesday night convinced that Sen. Vance had won a substantial triumph. In that victory, he also vindicated President Donald J. Trump’s gamble in selecting a running mate so early in his career. At 40, with only two years in the U.S. Senate, Vance is only a few months older than Richard Nixon when President Dwight Eisenhower picked him to be the Republican vice-presidential nominee in 1952. Nixon would remain a major part of the political scene for 42 years. That would give Sen. Vance a potential role in American government and politics until 2066.
When I got up on Wednesday morning, virtually all the commentaries validated the sense that the debate was something extraordinary.
This new reality was best summarized by Mark Halperin in the Wide World of News newsletter:
“1. One can pretend, as most of the Dominant Media does, that Tim Walz was not ‘clobbered’ by JD Vance, but, as honest Joe Klein (fully credentialed as second-to-none in contempt for Donald Trump and Vance) told the world, Walz was indeed clobbered, so badly that it ‘wasn’t as bad as Biden’s debilitated performance in June, but it was close.’ Remember: Biden’s perf[romance] was so bad it ended his candidacy and career.”
Pollster Frank Luntz tweeted that his focus group voted 12 to 2 that Vance had won.
Glenn Greenwald posted on X: “The most bizarre part of that debate was how Tim Walz repeatedly and flagrantly undercut Dems’ core attack on Trump/Vance: that they’re “weird,” freakish dangers wildly out of the mainstream.
“Everything Walz said treated Vance as a totally normal, reasonable, likable colleague.”
The most bizarre part of that debate was how Tim Walz repeatedly and flagrantly undercut Dems' core attack on Trump/Vance: that they're "weird," freakish dangers wildly out of the mainstream.
Everything Walz said treated Vance as a totally normal, reasonable, likable colleague.
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posted:“I would rate that the most successful Republican debate performance of this century, eclipsing Romney in the first debate with Obama in 2012.”
Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume had no regard for the performances of moderators Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, saying they were “obnoxious” and made the debate a three-on-one proposition against Vance.
These were just a few. The Trump-Vance campaign collected no fewer than 22 journalists and public figures who agreed that Vance trounced Walz. Donald Trump Jr. was the third big winner in this debate. He had strongly backed Sen. Vance as a running mate and worked to get his father to pick him. That choice certainly seemed to work out brilliantly.
As Caitlin Doornbos in the NY Post wrote, Gov. Walz’s problems started at the beginning. “Tim Walz got one chance to make a first impression at Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, and blew it before his opponent, JD Vance, even got the chance to speak.”
His nerves clearly kept him from meeting the challenge.
Finally, Gov. Walz said a couple of things that were just weird. In a clear moment of confusion, he said he’d become “friends with school shooters.” When asked why he had lied about being at Tiananmen Square during the 1989 suppression and killing of students demonstrating for democracy, Walz ultimately called himself a “knucklehead”for simply saying something that was false. Being the “knucklehead candidate” is not a good way to campaign for the last five weeks before the election.
After last night, Sen. Vance is a huge national figure among Republicans and conservatives. He will have much more impact campaigning than he did before the debate.
After Tuesday night, Gov. Walz will be seen by most Americans as someone who is clearly not ready to be president or vice president.
Vice President Kamala Harris’s comment that she was exhausted and sleepless when she picked him will now look like a first step toward minimizing his role – and her ability to make decisions under pressure.
A vindicated President Trump will campaign with more enthusiasm and a greater sense of certainty that he has built a winning ticket.
Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995-1999 and a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He is chairman of Gingrich 360.
The Middle East moved closer to a long-feared regional war Wednesday, a day after Iran fired a barrage of missiles at Israel and Israel said it began limited ground incursions into Lebanon targeting the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia. Israel said it intercepted many of the missiles, and officials in Washington said U.S. destroyers assisted in Israel’s defense. Iran said most of its missiles hit their targets. There have been no reports of casualties.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed late Tuesday to retaliate against Iran, which he said, “made a big mistake tonight and it will pay for it.” An Iranian commander threatened wider strikes on infrastructure if Israel retaliates. U.S. President Biden said Wednesday that he would not support an Israeli attack targeting Iran’s nuclear program.
The United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting for Wednesday to address the spiraling conflict.
Israel said Wednesday that eight of its soldiers have been killed in combat in southern Lebanon.
Israel and Hezbollah have traded fire across the Lebanon border almost daily since the day after Hamas’ cross-border attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 250 others hostage. Israel declared war on the militant group in the Gaza Strip in response. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in the territory, and just over half the dead have been women and children, according to local health officials.
Direct hit
At least one aircraft hangar at a key Israeli military air base appears to have taken a direct hit during a massive barrage of Iranian missiles, according to a satellite image analyzed by The Associated Press. Images of the Nevatim air base in southern Israel on Wednesday show a large hole blown in the roof of a row of buildings near the main runway. Large pieces of debris can be seen spread around the building.
Israel’s military did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the satellite images.
Nevatim is home to the Israeli Air Force’s most advanced aircraft, including U.S.-produced F-35 Lightening II stealth fighter jets. It is not clear from the satellite imagery whether any aircraft were in the hanger when it was struck. Nevatim also sustained light damage during an Iranian missile and drone attack in April.
Lebanon weighs in
Lebanon’s U.N. ambassador says his government rejects the war between Israel and Hezbollah militants in the country. Hadi Hachem told an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council Wednesday that the government wants the enforcement of a U.N. Security Council resolution that was supposed to end the last Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006. It called for all armed groups, including Hezbollah, to be disarmed and the deployment of Lebanese forces to the southern border with Israel. None of this has happened.
The Lebanese ambassador said fully implementing the resolution is the only solution to the ongoing war and Israel’s “barbaric aggression.” He said Lebanon is opening enlistment for 1,500 new soldiers to strengthen the national army’s presence in the south.
“Lebanon today is stuck between the Israeli destruction machine and the ambitions of others in the region,” Hachem said, alluding to Iran’s support for Hezbollah.
Americans flee
The State Department says about 100 American citizens and family members have left Lebanon on a flight contracted with a commercial airline. Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Wednesday that the flight to Istanbul was not a charter flight but also was not on the Lebanese national carrier Middle East Airlines, which is the only commercial airline flying scheduled flights in and out of Beirut. Since Sept. 28, MEA has made about 800 seats on its flights out of Beirut available for American citizens, but Miller could not say how many had taken those MEA flights.
He said some 6,000 American citizens have now asked for information from the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on how they might be able to leave the country, although only a small fraction of those have asked for actual assistance.
Escape to Syria
Thousands of Syrians and Lebanese continue to pour into Syria to escape Israeli airstrikes in southern Lebanon. On Wednesday, an Associated Press team saw hundreds crowding the Jousieh border crossing, one of several points of entry into Syria. The crossing is around 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Syria’s central city of Homs, where many said they were headed. Most of those waiting to enter Syria were from eastern Lebanon’s city of Baalbek and surrounding areas, which have been hard hit by Israeli airstrikes in recent days. The militant group Hezbollah has a strong presence in that region, but many of those killed and wounded have been civilians. Some came from as far as the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Ola Hallaq, her husband and two kids were among those waiting to be processed. Originally from Homs, she fled Syria at the start of the civil war in 2011 and settled in Baalbek. Now, as Israel pounds eastern Lebanon, the family is returning home despite the uncertainty and lack of income.
“I’m returning to my country because of the war … there was so much destruction all around,” she said.
Dabbah Mashaal, an official at the crossing, said 10,000 displaced Syrians and 7,700 Lebanese have crossed the border in recent days.
UN Ire
The United Nations says Israel’s ban on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres entering the country is a “political statement.” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric told reporters Wednesday that Foreign Minister Israel Katz saying Guterres is “persona non grata” is “one more attack on the United Nations staff that we’ve seen from the government of Israel.”
Katz accuses Guterres of being biased against Israel, and says he never condemned Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on southern Israel. Israel also claims staff from the U.N. aid agency helping Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, are Hamas members who participated in the Oct. 7 attacks.
Dujarric countered that Guterres has repeatedly condemned the Hamas attacks and sexual violence, and stressed that the U.N. still engages with Israel “at the operational level and other levels.”
JOINT BASE ANDREWS, Md. — President Joe Biden says he will not support an Israeli attack on sites related to Tehran’s nuclear program.
“The answer is no,” Biden said Wednesday, when asked if he would support such retaliation after Iran fired about 180 missiles at Israel on Tuesday. Biden’s comments came after he and fellow Group of Seven leaders spoke by phone on Wednesday to discuss coordinating new sanctions against Iran. The White House said in a statement that the G7 leaders “unequivocally condemned Iran’s attack against Israel” and Biden reiterated the United States’ “full solidarity and support to Israel and its people.”
All the while, the administration has signaled that it’s urging that Israel display restraint in how it responds to Tuesday’s missile attack, which Biden said was “ineffective and defeated.”
Hamas claims responsibility
Hamas’ military wing has claimed responsibility for a mass shooting in Tel Aviv that left seven people dead and wounded 16 more. It said the two attackers, Mohammed Mesek and Ahmed Himouni, were its militants who hailed from the southern West Bank city of Hebron. Israeli police said the two opened fire Tuesday evening in the Jaffa neighborhood of Tel Aviv, including shooting directly into a light rail carriage crowded with passengers that was stopped at a station. Police said the pair were shot and killed by security guards and armed pedestrians.
The attack came moments before Iran launched a massive barrage of rockets towards Israel, sending people into bomb shelters across the country.
It remains unclear how the two men entered Israel from the West Bank. Hamas, which has ruled Gaza since 2007, is active in various cities and refugee camps in the West Bank.
On Wednesday, locals left flowers and candles at the train stop, where bullet holes peppered the signs and benches.
Maya Brandwine said she was at a coffee shop on the street when the shooting broke out. During the subsequent Iranian missile attack, she took cover in a bomb shelter as police swept for suspects.
“It’s a nightmare, and we’re starting to get used to it,” she said, blaming the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for the violence.
Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
Midshipmen fans root for the Naval Academy at a football game in Annapolis, Maryland. The academy’s administrators seem to have adopted that same “Damn the torpedos, full steam ahead” attitude with regard to plans to bring a partisan political speaker to campus Oct. 10 despite Pentagon rules prohibiting that. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)
By inviting a speaker, history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University—who has already said that she plans to attack presidential candidate Donald Trump in the annual Bancroft Lecture at the U.S. Naval Academy on Oct. 10—the academy is violating Defense Department directives prohibiting the military from engaging in partisan political activity.
In addition to constituting a clear violation of a long-standing, mandatory policy, families whose sons and daughters are attending this august military institution should be outraged by the academy’s partisan indoctrination of future officers of the U.S. Navy.
The Bancroft Lecture is held in October of each year and “was established by the Naval Academy’s History Department to honor the academy’s founder, George Bancroft.” Bancroft was the secretary of the Navy during President James Polk’s administration in the 1840s and became a good friend of Republican President Abraham Lincoln.
According to the academy, which was founded in 1845, the lecture is supposed to bring in historians to speak about “their research and the relevance of the historian’s craft to today’s world.” But that’s a far cry from delivering a partisan screed attacking a major political candidate in the midst of a hotly contested presidential campaign, which is precisely what Ben-Ghiat has indicated she’s going to do next week.
She claims that what motivates former President Trump is his “authoritarian character, desire to destroy democratic values and ideals, and loyalty to autocrats” such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping. Going further, she claims that Trump has an “attachment to America’s enemies.”
One can debate the hallucinations that apparently inhabit the mind of this so-called historian from New York University, but the more important point is that her venomous, partisan attack on a political candidate involves the Naval Academy, which is sponsoring her lecture in direct violation of Defense Department rules.
Department of Defense Directive No. 1344.10 (Feb. 19, 2008) bans active members of the military, which includes the naval officers who are administrators and teachers at the academy, from engaging in “partisan political activities.”
By putting the academy’s official imprimatur on this rancorous harangue, the academy is doing exactly what the directive says it shouldn’t do: “appear to imply official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement” of what is patently a partisan, political speech.
In an op-ed about what she intends to say to the plebes at the Bancroft Lecture, Ben-Ghiat claims Trump has a “consistent habit” of “insulting and mocking the military.” According to her, Trump’s “personal predilections and attitudes … mirror those of authoritarians more generally,” and that authoritarianism will be part of her lecture on “Fascist Italy, Pinochet’s Chile, and the Russian military.”
She claims that Trump’s supposed repeated “attacks” on the military show “what side he favors in the struggle between democracy and autocracy.”
Even if you agree with Ben-Ghiat’s wild, unsupported claims, that isn’t the point. The point is that the Naval Academy should not be inviting, sponsoring, or in any way endorsing lecturers who are at the academy to give what is clearly a political speech, whether it’s attacking or supporting Donald Trump, or attacking or supporting Kamala Harris.
The mission of the Naval Academy, it says, is to “imbue” its midshipmen “with the highest ideals of duty, honor, and loyalty” so they will be able “assume the highest responsibilities of command, citizenship, and government.”
Whoever invited Ben-Ghiat to speak on campus used extremely poor judgment. Our military service academies are publicly funded, government-run institutions, designed to train future warfighters to serve this country with honor and distinction, regardless of who is the commander in chief. Graduates serve under presidents of both parties and focus on the defense of our country.
We previously discussed the defamation case against NYU Law Professor and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann. He is being sued by lawyer Stefan Passantino after Weissmann said that he coached former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson to “lie” to Congress. At the time, I wrote that “it is hard to see how Weissmann can avoid a trial.” U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan apparently agrees. She just rejected Weissmann’s motion to dismiss the case.
The controversial former aide to Special Counsel Robert Mueller (and NYU law professor) is being sued after declaring that attorney Stefan Passantino (who represented Hutchinson before Congress) told her to lie.
Weissmann’s controversial commentary was not a surprise to many critics.
Many of us questioned Mueller hiring Weissmann given his reputation for stretching legal authority and perceived political bias. Weissmann reportedly congratulated acting Attorney General Sally Yates after she ordered the Justice Department not to assist President Donald Trump on his immigration ban. The Supreme Court would ultimately affirm Trump’s underlying authority, but Yates refused to allow the Justice Department to assist a sitting president in defending that authority. Weissmann gushed in an email to her, writing “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.”
What Weissmann often lacked in precedent, he made up for in hyperbole. That signature is at the heart of the current lawsuit. On September 13, 2023, Weissmann was referring to Judy Hunt and noted on Twitter (now X) that “Hunt also is Cassidy Hutchinson’s good lawyer. (Not the one who coached her to lie).”
In making this claim against Passantino, Weissmann actually triggered the “per se” defamation standard twice. These are categories that have been treated as defamatory per se. The allegation against Passantino would not only constitute criminal conduct but also unethical professional conduct. Passantino denounces the statement as an “insidious lie” and “smear.”
AliKahn noted that “At her fifth deposition, Ms. Hutchinson discussed a line of questioning from her first deposition about the January 6 incident in the Presidential limousine,” AliKhan wrote. “She explained that, during a break after facing repeated questions on the topic, she had told Mr. Passantino in private, ‘I’m f*****. I just lied.’ Mr. Passantino responded, ‘You didn’t lie. . . . They don’t know what you know, Cassidy. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So, you [sic] saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.’”
Hutchinson repeatedly confirmed that Passantino “never told me to lie,” “didn’t tell me to lie,” and “He told me not to lie.”
While Judge AliKhan on Monday tossed out the second count in the complaint as lacking foundation for the claim of financial harm, she refused to dismiss Passantino’s defamation claim and moved the case forward toward trial. That could prove embarrassing as Passantino’s team searches for evidence of malice in his emails and other communications.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – Putting the VP debate in simple terms. Vance spoke from a put-America-first perspective to solve America’s problems, while Walz came from a big-government Marxist viewpoint when looking at the disaster Kamala’s policies have created.
Here We Go… CBS Hacks “Fact-Check” JD Vance — Then Won’t Let Him Speak — Then CUT HIS MIC …Update: Vance was Right!
By Jim Hoft – Oct 01, 2024 – The Gateway Pundit
The far-left CBS hacks moderating the debate on Tuesday took time to “fact-check” JD Vance on the 20,000 Haitian migrants that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris flew into Springfield, Ohio in the past three years. Senator Vance then interrupted and corrected Margaret Brennan about the Biden plan to fly in illegals to American cities. That’s when CBS cut his mic! READ MORE…
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
California’s Warden/Governor Gavin “I do what the hell I want” Newsome
Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., signed a law Sunday undermining the will of Huntington Beach voters who approved a measure requiring voter ID. The new state law bars cities from adopting such measures. In March, 53.4% of Huntington Beach residents approved a ballot measure that would require voters present identification in order to vote in municipal elections. The measure was slated to take effect in 2026 and also permitted the city to “provide more in-person voting locations” and “monitor ballot drop-boxes.” But Newsom signed into law Sunday legislation that was originally introduced in response to the Huntington Beach city council approving the measure prior to placing it on the ballot. The new law prohibits“a local government from enacting or enforcing any charter provision, ordinance, or regulation requiring a person to present identification for the purpose of voting or submitting a ballot at any polling place, vote center, or other location where ballots are cast or submitted, as specified.”
The state previously sued Huntington Beach in April to prevent the will of the voters (in the name of “democracy”). California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the city claiming, “the right to freely cast your vote is the foundation of our democracy and Huntington Beach’s voter ID policy flies in the face of this principle.”
It is unclear whether the lawsuit will still be pursued. The Federalist has inquired with Bonta’s office for a status update.
Bonta had previously sent a letter to city officials in September 2023 claiming the measure “conflicts with state law” and falsely alleged voter ID measures “serve to suppress voter participation.” Bonta told city officials to withdraw the measure or else Bonta would take “action.”
Bonta’s suit alleged Huntington Beach’s voter ID provisions were “preempted and invalid” in matters in which “local law conflicts with state law reasonably tailored to the resolution of a statewide concern.”
The suit also argued the measure undermined the authority of the state legislature, “placing the onus on registered voters to establish their eligibility to vote, and groundlessly challenging the right to vote.”
Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates said in response to the suit that the city would fight to “uphold and defend the will of the people,” according to Courthouse News.
Gates argued that state law (at the time the measure was adopted by the city), did not prohibit the city from adopting the ballot measure. Gates pointed to the introduction of the legislation after the proposal was approved by the city council arguing, as reported by Courthouse News, that “this proves that Bonta [is] wrong — if passing voter ID laws was illegal, why was a new bill necessary?”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
Disrupting communications is a military strategy that has been deployed during wars throughout history. It’s also what the federal government has done to rural Americans as part of its war on Elon Musk, a tech billionaire whose support of free speech has put him at odds with the Biden administration and other powerful Democrats. The decision to cut rural Americans off from broadband communications had already been strongly criticized as harmful, politically motivated, and completely without merit even before Category 4 Hurricane Helene wrought destruction last week in some of the most remote areas of Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.
Now the FCC’s war on Musk may have turned deadly. The death toll is already at 138 Americans across six states, with many hundreds still missing. Among the serious problems facing rural victims is an inability to communicate with potential rescuers as roads are washed out, telecommunications are down, electricity is out, and people are facing fatal flooding.
It didn’t have to be this way.
In 2020, the Federal Communications Commission awarded Musk’s Starlink an $885.5 million award to help get broadband access to 642,000 rural homes and businesses in 35 states. A subsidiary of SpaceX, Starlink is a satellite internet system delivering high-speed internet to anyone on the planet. The plan would work out to less than $1,400 per linkup, same-day delivery of the necessary hardware, and only a few hours to get up and running.
Some 19,552 households and businesses in North Carolina would have had access to Starlink if they desired. Of the 21 worst-hit counties in North Carolina, the FCC-funded Starlink program would have served all or part of 17 of them, according to multiple officials. The FCC suddenly canceled that grant in 2022, a few months before Joe Biden suggested that the federal government find ways to go after Musk, a former Democrat who began criticizing some of the Democrat Party’s support of censorship of and lawfare against political opponents. After a challenge from SpaceX, the FCC reaffirmed its decision to cancel the award in 2023.
Democrat FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel implausibly claimed to believe that Starlink couldn’t provide the service it had promised, a claim that didn’t pass the smell test for many industry observers at the time it was made. Starlink and its military counterpart were in wide use by other government programs. What’s more, at this moment Donald Trump and Elon Musk are rushing Starlink kits to remote North Carolina on their own. So are other Americans doing relief operations. And the White House is claiming it is also going to send Starlink kits to the area.
“The @FCC would rather Americans die, than approve a very inexpensive way to connect people in disaster areas. They should be ashamed,” Maye Musk, the mother of Elon Musk, said on X. “Biden, Harris and the FCC are also punishing people in disaster areas and rural areas. Shame on them,”she added.
Other agencies also joined Democrats’ anti-Musk efforts. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the Department of Justice pursued multiple attacks on Musk and his companies. The Federal Trade Commission began harassing X by making myriad questionable document demands, including requests for information on the journalists who worked on the project exposing how previous leaders of Twitter had colluded with the federal government to censor American speech and debate. The National Labor Relations Board went after Tesla over its dress code. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are also investigating Musk and his companies.
The FCC’s politically motivated cancellation of the contract in 2022 left rural Americans with no options.
The cancellation “is without legal justification,” FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who voted against canceling the award, said at the time. “[I]t will leave rural Americans waiting on the wrong side of the digital divide.”
The FCC’s political action against Musk isn’t the only Biden administration action harming Americans who were ravaged by Helene. Joe Biden named Kamala Harris the Broadband Czar in April 2021 and placed her in charge of a $100 billion slush fund for broadband projects. At the Commerce Department, a $42.5 billion subset of that program was launched in 2021, with guidance written to limit the ability of Starlink to compete for contracts. The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) Program was supposed to fund programs in all 50 states. It has been a complete failure.
More than three years later, not a single rural American family or business has been connected to broadband through the program. At best the groundwork will begin four years after the launch and won’t finish until 2030 at the earliest. For that much taxpayer money, Starlink could be provided to 140 million people, and without the wait, observers noted.
The FCC’s anti-Musk efforts come at the same time that the Democrat-run agency fast-tracked a shocking application by a group backed by the Democrat Soros family to purchase more than 200 radio stations across the country. Federal law requires applicants with significant foreign ownership, as the Soros group has, to go through significant paperwork and security reviews prior to receiving licenses for radio stations. They didn’t follow the law and yet the FCC fast-tracked the approval for the first time in its history.
“Your last name should not determine how the government treats you, and very clearly that’s what is happening here,” said Carr of the FCC’s politicized actions on behalf of the Soros group and against the Musk group.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan says that the Iranian missile attack on Israel was “defeated and ineffective”, and that the U.S. military coordinated with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to repel the strikes. Iran launched nearly 200 ballistic missiles towards targets in Israel on Tuesday, Sullivan said at a Tuesday White House briefing, noting the move was a “significant escalation.”
The strikes were in response to the deaths of Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, Iran says. The move comes after weeks of Israeli strikes against Tehran’s proxies in the region.
Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile system intercepts rockets, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel, on Oct. 1, 2024. (REUTERS/Amir Cohen)
Sullivan said no deaths were reported on the Israeli side, although the White House is monitoring the reported death of a Palestinian civilian in Jericho in the West Bank.
“U.S. naval destroyers joined Israeli Air Defense units in firing interceptors to shoot down inbound missiles. President Biden and Vice President Harris monitored the attack and the response from the White House Situation Room, joined in person and remotely by their national security team,” Sullivan said.
“We do not know of any damage to aircraft or strategic military assets in Israel. In short, based on what we know at this point, this attack appears to have been defeated and ineffective. The word fog of war was invented for a situation like this. This is a fluid situation.”
Many missiles were intercepted by Israel’s missile defense systems, while others did hit the ground. The Pentagon says the U.S. fired approximately 12 interceptors against Iranian missiles.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan says that the Iranian missile attack on Israel was “defeated and ineffective” and that the U.S. military coordinated with the IDF to repel the strikes. (Fox News)
“This is a significant escalation by Iran, a significant event, and it is equally significant that we were able to step up with Israel and create a situation in which no one was killed in this attack in Israel… We are now going to look at what the appropriate next steps are to secure, first and foremost, American interests and then to promote stability to the maximum extent possible as we go forward,” Sullivan said.
He said the U.S. will consult with the Israelis on next steps in terms of response and how to deal with the Iranian attack.
The White House is particularly focused on protecting U.S. service members in the region and implored American citizens in Lebanon to follow the State Department’s guidance of finding civilian commercial means to leave the country, Sullivan said.
Rockets fly in the sky, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, as seen from Tel Aviv, Israel, on Oct. 1, 2024. (REUTERS/Ammar Awad)
Sullivan also expressed his condolences to the victims who were killed in a shooting in the Israeli city of Jaffa, located near Tel Aviv on Tuesday. At least eight people were killed and at least seven injured, local officials have told Fox News. The incident, which is believed to be a terror attack, took place Tuesday outside a newly built light rail station on Jerusalem Street. Authorities say at least two individuals who opened fire on a crowd of people have been neutralized.
Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had warned citizens to shelter in place and follow instructions from the Home Front Command as the Jewish State’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense system worked to intercept the incoming rockets on Tuesday.
Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said this latest barrage of missiles is in retaliation for the killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Lebanon, in an Israeli airstrike late last week and the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, according to Fox News Chief Foreign Correspondent Trey Yingst.
A gunshot victim is transported away from the scene of the shooting Tuesday. Emergency responders have reported multiple deaths as well as more victims in critical condition. (Gideon Markowicz/TPS-IL)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard warned in a statement released by Iranian state media that if Israel responds to the missile barrage, “it will face crushing attacks.” A senior White House official told Fox News earlier Tuesday morning that Iran was preparing to “imminently” launch a ballistic missile attack against Israel.
While White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre did not directly answer when asked if the United States had a heads-up from Iran about the strike ahead of time, Fox News was told by the Pentagon that they were “not aware of any pre-warning by Iran.”
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace, Liz Friden, Timothy H.J. Nerozzi, Trey Yingst and Yonat Friling contributed to this report.
Michael Dorgan is a writer for Fox News Digital and Fox Business.
You can send tips to michael.dorgan@fox.com and follow him on Twitter @M_Dorgan.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, seen here July 3, has been to China about 30 times. That has raised concerns of the chairman of a House committee. (Anna Moneymaker/ Getty Images)
Bethany Blankley is a contributor to Watchdog.org.
THE CENTER SQUARE—U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman Rep. James Comer subpoenaed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for information about Democratic vice-presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz’s alleged connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
Comer, R-Ky., on Monday subpoenaed Mayorkas after the committee received whistleblower disclosures, learning “of a non-classified, Microsoft Teams group chat among DHS employees and additional intelligence reports that contain information regarding Governor Walz’s connections to the CCP,” the Kentucky lawmaker said.
Comer’s letter to Mayorkas states: “The Committee has recently received whistleblower disclosures informing the Committee of serious concern among Department of Homeland personnel regarding a long-standing connection between the CCP and Minnesota Governor Timothy James Walz. Specifically, through whistleblower disclosures, the Committee has learned of a non-classified, Microsoft Teams group chat among DHS employees—titled ‘NST NFT Bi-Weekly Sync’—that contains information about Governor Walz that is relevant to the Committee’s investigation. The Committee has also learned that further relevant information regarding Governor Walz has been memorialized in both classified and unclassified documents in the control of DHS.”
The subpoena requires DHS to “produce these documents and communications regarding Governor Walz’s connections with the CCP” and provide intelligence information reports and regional intelligence notes related to Walz.
The committee has spent several years investigating CCP political warfare operations involving influencing “important figures in elite political circles to the benefit of the communist People’s Republic of China.” During briefings held with more than 20 federal agencies, it says it learned of CCP “efforts to influence subnational government leaders, including state governors.”
“The Committee’s investigation of the CCP—begun long before Governor Walz was elevated to be the vice-presidential candidate for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris—seeks to understand the extent of the CCP’s infiltration and influence campaign and to identify legislative reforms to combat CCP political warfare targeting prominent Americans for elite capture,” Comer wrote Mayorkas, adding:
“If a state governor and major political party’s nominee for Vice President of the United States has been a witting or unwitting participant in the CCP’s efforts to weaken our nation, this would strongly suggest that there are alarming weaknesses in the federal government’s effort to defend the United States from the CCP’s political warfare that must be urgently addressed.”
Obtaining the subpoenaed information will inform the committee about “how successful the CCP has been in waging political warfare in and against the United States, how effectively federal agencies are addressing the communist regime’s campaign, and what reforms are necessary to counter this threat,” he says.
In August, Comer launched an investigation into Walz “following reports detailing the Governor’s long-standing connections to CCP entities and officials.” Two weeks ago, he requested information from FBI Director Christopher Wray on Walz’s alleged CCP connection.
Walz says he’s visited China roughly 30 times after first teaching a year abroad there in 1989 and remains proud of his ties to China.
In response, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the committee’s ranking member, said, “What do you know, it’s the eve of the vice-presidential debate, and Chairman Comer has apparently been assigned another flotsam and jetsam errand from the GOP’s political smear barrel. The tarnished hero of the Biden impeachment investigation has just thrown out one of his classic boomerang ‘bombshell’ accusations, revealing to the world that employees at the Department of Homeland Security were actually chatting about Governor Tim Walz over Microsoft Teams message.”
Raskin also said it was a “comically trivial, last-ditch attempt to smear Governor Walz” as another “embarrassing and strained attempt to curry favor with Donald Trump’s collapsing campaign” and a way to distract Americans from “Trump’s miserable record on China.”
Raskin also said if Comer was “truly worried about elite capture by the CCP,” he would investigate former President Donald Trump; his daughter, Ivanka Trump; and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who Raskin claims financially profited from the CCP.
The subpoena commands Mayorkas to appear before the committee on Oct. 7 at 10 a.m.
Israel intercepts an Iranian ballistic missiles near the northern city of Baqa al-Gharbiya, Oct. 1. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images)
Sirens sounded all over Israel Tuesday night as ballistic missiles flared overhead. Millions of Israelis were directed to hide in bomb shelters while at least 180 Iranian projectiles entered Israeli airspace.
Israel’s Iron Dome intercepted most of the missiles, but some managed to get through and hit locations in central and southern Israel, according to the Israel Defense Forces. Two U.S. Navy destroyers aided Israel in the attack and fired about 12 interceptors against the missiles, according to the Pentagon.
Iran carried out a similar missile attack against Israel in April. Most of the missiles were shot down, but an air base in southern Israel did sustain minor damage. After the spring attack, President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “take the win.”
Biden said Tuesday that he and Vice President Kamala Harris “convened our national security team to discuss Iranian plans to launch an imminent missile attack against Israel. We discussed how the United States is prepared to help Israel defend against these attacks and protect American personnel in the region.”
This morning, @VP and I convened our national security team to discuss Iranian plans to launch an imminent missile attack against Israel.
We discussed how the United States is prepared to help Israel defend against these attacks, and protect American personnel in the region.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday that the U.S. is “committed to Israel’s defense,” but did not give specifics. Iran’s attack came in response to Israel killing multiple terrorist leaders in recent days and weeks, including Hamas and Hezbollah leaders.
Iran called its missile attack on Israel a “legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime—which involved targeting Iranian nationals and interests and infringing upon the national sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Iran’s legal, rational, and legitimate response to the terrorist acts of the Zionist regime—which involved targeting Iranian nationals and interests and infringing upon the national sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran—has been duly carried out. Should the Zionist regime…
Iran warned Israel and its allies: “Should the Zionist regime dare to respond or commit further acts of malevolence, a subsequent and crushing response will ensue. Regional states and the Zionists’ supporters are advised to part ways with the regime.”
There were no immediate reports of deaths in Israel following the attack, but at least six people were killed in a shooting in Tel Aviv during the rocket attack. Police neutralized the attackers and say it was an act of terrorism.
The Pentagon is discussing next steps with Israel.
We have been discussing how colleges and universities have been using security concerns as a way to bar conservative and libertarian speakers. Another barrier has been the imposition of prohibitive security fees as a condition for such speakers to appear on campus, fees generally not required for liberal speakers. Now, in a significant free speech victory, U.S. District Judge David Urias has enjoined the University of New Mexico from imposing a $5,400 security fee for former collegiate swimmer and activist Riley Gaines after speaking on campus. UNM has a history of cancellation campaigns against conservative and libertarian speakers, as previously discussed on this blog.
Gaines has become a national figure in her campaign against biologically male students competing in women’s sports. While it is a position that is supported by an overwhelming majority of Americans, faculty and students have repeatedly targeted Gaines with cancel campaigns and disruptive protests. In this case, UNM originally demanded over $10,000. The lawsuit brought by the Leadership Institute named UNM President Garnett Stokes and other UNM officials as defendants. Judge Urias was legitimately suspicious of the demand and found that it violated the First Amendment.
In his 16-page order in Leadership Institute v. Stokes(D.N.M.), Judge Urias noted that Gaines travels with her own security (itself a sad statement about this Age of Rage). The court noted the rather fluid standard applied to Gaines:
[T]he quote of over $10,000 was for every officer UNM employed—thirty-three officers; nearly one for every three attendees the students expected. When TP-UNM asked why Defendant Stump intended to assign every officer to the Gaines event, and whether it was because of the speaker or the inviting organization, he responded that “it’s all based on individual assessments,” that they were looking at the “individual,” and that “there is not a criteria [sic].”
He also told the students that if an organization were to screen the Barbie movie in a venue on campus, he likely would not require even a single officer because the UNM police were “not worried about the Barbie movie.” He then said that security was “consistent” in how it assessed fees “to Turning Point” in the past. He described past TP-UNM events featuring other conservative speakers that generated protests at UNM. A few times during the meeting, he reiterated that UNM assesses security fees on a “case-by-case basis.” …
Notably, the court detailed how fewer than 10 protesters actually showed up and demonstrated outside of the room. Nevertheless, UNM hit Turning Point with the fee for twenty-seven officers at the event who charged for a total of 95.25 hours.
The court applied the holding in Forsyth County v. Nationalist Movement (1992) in which the Supreme Court held that the government can impose extra security fees due to the controversial status of speakers or groups. In writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice Henry Blackmun held that “Nothing in the law or its application prevents the official from encouraging some views and discouraging others through the arbitrary application of fees. The First Amendment prohibits the vesting of such unbridled discretion in a government official.”
Judge Urias found precisely such a barrier imposed by the UNM:
When a policy allows “appraisal of facts, the exercise of judgment, and the formation of an opinion by the licensing authority, the danger of censorship and of abridgment of our precious First Amendment freedoms is too great to be permitted[.]” Forsyth County.… Although the question in this case is closer than that in Forsyth, the Court nonetheless finds that Plaintiffs have demonstrated the security fee policy in this case is similar enough to render it overly broad. Although the policy lists criteria for officials to consider when assessing event security, such as venue size and location, the list ultimately leaves the decision of how much to charge for security up to the whim of university officials. For example, the policy does not explain a method for determining how much more security is required for a small venue as compared to a large one, or for a daytime event as compared to a nighttime event.
Significantly, the policy states that the “basic cost of security … will be charged to all groups” based on a schedule of charges that the UNM Police Department has on its website, but despite this, the department does not actually delineate the amount of this “basic cost of security.” Though the security fee policy also states that the police department “regularly” updates the “schedule of charges based on the factors” and that “[t]he basic cost of security according to this schedule will be charged to all groups,” there is no schedule of charges.
Additionally, the preamble to the policy indicates that university officials “may” assess security fees but does not provide guidance for when they may or may not assess these fees, which contributes to the problem of allowing university officials overly broad discretion. In sum, Plaintiffs have shown a substantial likelihood of success on the merits of their overbreadth claim because the security fee policy does not contain limiting language that includes “narrowly drawn, reasonable and definite standards[,]” and it does not include anything to prevent UNM administrators from exercising their discretion in a content-based manner….
The ruling is a notable victory for free speech in creating additional precedent against the use of security fees as a deterrent to groups in inviting targeted speakers like Riley Gaines. Conservative groups have long complained that far left speakers are rarely targeted by cancel campaigns and even more rarely hit with these security fees. In past cases, a security deposit is demanded upfront, creating a barrier for many groups.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Opinion
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
You Version
Bible Translations, Devotional Tools and Plans, BLOG, free mobile application; notes and more
Political
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
NEWSMAX
News, Opinion, Interviews, Research and discussion
Spiritual
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
Bible Gateway
The Bible Gateway is a tool for reading and researching scripture online — all in the language or translation of your choice! It provides advanced searching capabilities, which allow readers to find and compare particular passages in scripture based on
What Did You Say? 
You must be logged in to post a comment.